The Blood Dimmed Tide (7 page)

It was late evening when we docked at Sligo. It seemed a gloomy place, the wild and bleak shoreline leading to a humdrum town hunkering under the sombre silhouette of Ben Bulben, Sligo’s familiar mountain landmark. A pair of Royal Irish Constabulary officers made their way up the landing ramp to stop some of the passengers in steerage. They wore a distinctive dark green uniform with black buttons and insignia reminiscent of the British Army rifle brigade. They searched through baggage and inspected papers with the air of men who found the very smell of sea air suspicious.

The nurse pushed to the front of the queue. She seemed in a hurry to be off the boat. With scant regard for safety, she propelled her invalid down the landing ramp, his wheelchair squawking horribly, the hood of his army coat pulled low over his head, his eyes covered like those of a condemned man. The only parts of him visible was his mouth, which was stretched into a contorted ecstatic smile, and his large hands. Throughout the voyage, they had dangled lifelessly from his thin wrists like dying plants, but now they gripped the armrests with restored vigour. A rare triumphant smile also broke out on the nurse’s face. Then she caught the wary gaze of the policemen, and a look of proud disdain flashed in her eyes, as though she was angry at being caught in a secret moment of delight.

One of the officers approached her and she roared, ‘What are you doing? Can’t you see you’re in my way?’

Deftly, she steered the wheelchair around him and down the ramp at speed, driving the grinning invalid like a demented demon onto Irish soil. The thought crossed my mind that the roar of her voice and the sweep of her formidable figure through the disembarking crowds were like a call to war.

7

Knight of Wands

AFTER several days of sensory deprivation on the grey seas, the colour of early spring flowers seemed to me as intense as gemstones. I was riding a four-year-old gelding through the Gulf Stream warmed forests of Lissadell Estate. The trees were already in bud, a glimmering screen of tantalising green, and the wind that sifted through them felt mild and fresh. Ahead of me rode Richard Denver, the estate manager, whom Yeats had arranged to be my guide.

I had spent my first night in Ireland in the estate’s gatehouse, a small block of granite stone, with peace and solitude its only comforts. It had been previously occupied by a pair of Church of Ireland clergymen from Dublin who had come for a holiday on their bicycles. But that had been the previous autumn, and over the winter, the place had grown mildewy and damp.

Denver knocked on my door shortly after seven o’clock and offered to take me on a tour of the estate, before visiting Rosemary O’Grady’s former cottage, which lay on the periphery of the three hundred acre grounds. An Irish draught horse was waiting for me.

‘I’m putting you on Cromwell,’ he said. ‘A good horse for the inexperienced. Keep your hands down, elbows in, a firm rein and gripping knees. Remember you must be the master and not the horse, else it might take the bit between its teeth and throw you off a cliff.’

The estate manager had the dark locks and eyes and the swashbuckling manner of one of Yeats’ wild Irish horsemen. He watched with a wary look as I scrambled onto the gelding’s back. It broke into a trot with barely a kick and I felt the exciting power of landed wealth carry me down a lane overgrown with elderberry bushes and ferns. The pleasure of a pleasant early spring morning was tinged with the barely suppressed panic of being in charge of such an impressive beast. Therefore, it was with a jittery sense of elation that I followed Denver’s larger chestnut mare. I was hardly an accomplished rider and I fervently hoped my horse was a forgiving and gentle beast.

The broad flat leaves of rhododendron and laurel trees slapped against the horses’ sides as we made our way down gravelled avenues. I caught a glimpse of the over-sized Lissadell mansion and its irredeemably barren face of granite, and in the east, the flat top of Ben Bulben, which in the morning light looked as solemn as an altar. Whatever the menacing nature of the changes the country was undergoing, and the atrocities being committed in the name of freedom, the grounds at Lissadell appeared to be steeped contentedly in the glory days of the Protestant Ascendancy.

The horses were used to the estate, leaping with ease over stone walls and thorny hollows. We skimmed a blackthorn hedge and squeezed through thickets of oak and ash. We crossed a field wall running westward, and rode to within a few yards of a cliff. Denver pointed to a remote silver strand, and ten minutes later, we were racing along the breaking waves, the horses’ hooves adding to the leaping sea spray. Bursts of rain tracked us across the seaweedy shore, and then we were back on forest paths.

Denver turned his horse and trotted alongside me. So far he had been inscrutable, neither obviously friendly nor downright hostile.

‘I’m duty bound to give you all the assistance you require,’ he said. ‘However, first, I want to know why you are so interested in Rosemary O’Grady.’

My reply was cagey. ‘Mr Yeats sent me to Ireland on a personal matter. Which naturally I will not divulge to anyone.’

Denver gave a hoot of laughter, which unsettled my horse. ‘I know perfectly well why you are here. Yeats has sent you to seek out Rosemary’s ghost on behalf of his mystical society.’

He gave my animal a crack of his whip, which sent it off into a kidney-jarring bolt. I bounced about on its broad back, unable to return to a trot.

Denver cantered at ease beside me. ‘Don’t worry if you fall off,’ he said. ‘It might knock some sense into you.’

I fought to regain control of the animal until Denver leaned over and took hold of its reins. He grinned at me. ‘I fear that Yeats has sent you on a folly of his over-heated imagination.’

‘All I know is that a young woman has died and no one knows why.’

In truth, however, I feared he was right. I had arrived in Sligo, but still did not know what Yeats expected me to do.

‘You be straight with me and I’ll be straight with you,’ said Denver.

‘Of course.’

‘You’ve come to a land of exiles, gypsies and thieves to chase the ghost of a servant girl. Anyone who knew anything about her death will have gone to ground like rabbits. Besides, the police have already followed all lines of enquiry and exhausted them.’

‘What about you? What do you know about her life?’

‘To be honest, I know more about her death than her life. But first I want to show you what is happening to the Ireland Yeats once knew and loved.’

He backed his horse away, swung it round in a tight circle and galloped off. My horse took after his, propelling me over bramble traps and deep ditches of mud. More than once, I lost his trail and had to shout until he returned. He regarded me with a mixture of amusement and wariness. My city-bound sense of orientation told me we were riding in spirals through a labyrinth of leafy corridors, without really going anywhere. It occurred to me that by placing me on such a powerful horse, Denver had succeeded in turning me into a captive audience, one that he could keep his eye on and intimidate at will.

Soon we had left behind the boundary walls of Lissadell Estate. We rode on for several hours until my legs ached. Through iron-wrought gates and overgrown hedges, I caught glimpses of castle-like mansions that seemed enchanted by the wildness of their overgrown gardens.

‘What happened to the people who lived here? Did they run out of money?’

‘Not money,’ replied Denver. ‘Time.’

The glory and fortune of Ireland’s landed gentry languished in neglect, a collapsing graveyard lavishly decorated with entangled statues, fountains, courtyards, and the dark towers of chapels and follies. Denver listed the family names as we passed each abandoned estate, like an executioner in a corridor of condemned cells.

‘When one family departs, so do a string of others, in extremely rapid succession,’ he said. ‘These were once the best managed estates in Ireland, or anywhere in the empire. We built tennis courts and walled gardens and taught our tenants about soil and hygiene. We encouraged them to change their primitive farming methods and ancient superstitions. We weaned them off their reliance on disease-ridden potatoes. But all that has stopped now. Ireland’s heyday is over for good.’ His voice was tinged with disgust, and there was a self-justifying tone to his anger.

We trotted in the direction of a stone tower jutting through the trees. The horses pulled up to a set of broken gates weighed down by thorns. Denver explained that they marked the entrance to Burke’s estate, which had been abandoned shortly after the Rising. It had already fallen into a state of irreparable neglect. He dismounted and pushed the gates open. A shower of rust fell from the massive groaning hinges. The horses’ ears shot forward and they began whinnying. I squeezed my animal’s sides and pushed it through its fear. Ahead of us lay another mansion enclosed in a plantation of rhododendron and laurel.

‘Great people lived and died in houses like these,’ he said. ‘Magistrates, colonels, members of parliament, captains and governors. These peasant rebels are killing our great houses. To kill a good house where great men lived, married and died should be declared a capital offence.’

He broke a birch branch from the hedge and smacked it against the trailing brambles. The resiny smell of leaves hung in the air. He then expounded on the important Anglo-Irish families of Sligo, speaking at length on the part they played in making Ireland’s wealth and social fabric. Throughout he made repeated references to the connections with his own family name, making it clear that he was the inheritor of the same nation-building stock and the beneficiary of first-class breeding.

I followed my walking history lesson and his horse through a dense grove of yew trees. The wind breathed through the unmoving branches. From what I could see of the estate, the only thing on the move was nature, in its grandest sense, flowing along its own mutating course. In the rose gardens, a vegetal panic had broken out. Weeds welled up and drowned the bushes and shrubs. The house itself had become a prisoner of its former horticultural glories. Jasmine and clematis netted the bay windows, the panes of which had been broken, presumably by vandals or thieves. Birds had whitened the pavements beneath the roof eaves with their droppings. For all its tons of marble and granite, the mansion looked impotent, a gaping shell surrounded by encroaching wildness.

‘We are at war with the Germans,’ said Denver. ‘This is a time when you should look to your countrymen for kinship and allegiance. The last thing you expect is insurrection and betrayal, vandalism and attacks in the night. Who are the people who have banded together to overthrow us? A few small farmers, labourers and national schoolmasters. That’s all they are.’

He then kicked his horse into a gallop along the avenue in a show-off burst of exultant muscle that spooked my gelding and had him wheeling in tight circles as though he were under attack from the motionless yews.

When the horse had settled, I wondered about the background to Rosemary’s life as a Catholic servant girl working at one of the few remaining Protestant estates. Perhaps with so much violence surrounding her she had felt disinclined to report her fears that someone was trying to kill her. Why would she, when the threat of murder hung over every one?

‘These are anxious times,’ I said when I caught up with Denver. ‘What part does Rosemary’s unexplained death play in all this?’

‘Everyone is saying she was murdered.’

‘And was she?’

‘Murdered? Yes. But the girl had been inviting trouble.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Rosemary was bewitchingly pretty, with a confidence bordering on the brazen. She wasn’t shy and she wasn’t a giggler. She had a lot more going on in her life than the other servants. The rumour was she had joined the Daughters of Erin, a secret Republican sisterhood devoted to the destruction of Ireland.’

‘You knew her personally?’

‘I can’t remember ever having a proper conversation with her, if that’s what you mean.’

‘But you knew her.’

Denver removed his riding gloves and took out a pocket flask of whiskey. ‘I danced with her a few times.’ He knocked back a mouthful. ‘But then everyone danced with Rosemary.’

‘Really?’

‘No. I’m being mischievous. More truthful to say that everyone wanted to dance with her.’ He offered me a drink but I declined.

‘When was the last time you saw her?’

‘At a Céilidh for Lissadell staff. A few nights before she was killed. She teased me for making a botch of the three-hand reel. That was the last time I spoke to her.’

‘But not the last time you saw her.’

‘Correct.’ Denver hesitated and chose his words carefully. ‘I’m a middle-class Protestant and she was a peasant Catholic girl. Even though we worked on the same estate, we were unlikely to have many opportunities for social interaction. My life and hers ran parallel for most of the time, but it astonished me how difficult it was to contrive a private meeting with her. In other words, I saw as much of her as I could, which was not enough.’

‘Where did you last see her?’

‘She left the dance early and walked home along the beach at Blind Sound.’ He took another mouthful of whiskey and put the flask back in his pocket. ‘I saw her wade out into the sea. The water was much too cold for bathing.’

‘You weren’t alarmed by her behaviour?’

‘No. I had seen her wade out before, and she always came in.’

‘Yet a day later she was found dead on the same beach?’

‘The truth is if she hadn’t always been dashing off to subversive meetings, nothing would have happened to her.’

‘Who organised the meetings?’

‘The Daughters of Erin. Or
Inghinidhe na h
Éireann
, as they call themselves.’

‘And that is why she was killed?’

‘Why else would anyone murder her?’

‘That’s not an answer. It’s another question.’

‘It’s the truth.’

‘Perhaps it was reason enough to arrest her. But why kill her? What sort of threat did a girl of nineteen pose to British Rule?’

‘There is more than one war going on in Ireland at this present time. Women of all classes are rebelling, and some people don’t like that. They think it’s wrong for women to wear the same clothes and rise to the same level as men. They put the keeping of order above everything else. Political and social order.

‘Someone has to take control, but should that mean killing people?’

‘In a state of emergency, yes.’

The wind rattled the open windows of the mansion. The tinkling of glass breaking echoed from within. The horses grew agitated like two clairvoyants about to see a ghost.

Denver was distracted. ‘I think we have one of them,’ he said. ‘This is very fortunate. These vandals think they can break into our great houses and plunder as they wish. It is time they were taught a lesson.’