King of Morning, Queen of Day (22 page)

I asked if she recalled where the child had come from. It might have been yesterday to Sister Agnes.

“From my brother, in County Sligo.” Seeing that despite myself, I had permitted a look of surprise to cross my face, she said genially, “Yes, even nuns have brothers. And mothers, too, and fathers. And families. A proud family it is that has a daughter a one-time Mother Superior of a convent; doubly proud if it has a daughter a nun and a son a priest.”

“Your brother is a priest?”

“Was a priest. Called to the higher service of Our Lord these twelve years past. Not many of us left. A brother in America, of course, and a sister married to an Australian. My brother was the priest of a small parish just to the north of Sligo.”

A sound like a slowly tolling, ponderous gong sounded in my head. The perfume of Sister Agnes’s cloister garden was suddenly dizzying.

“Was the family name by any chance Halloran?”

“It was most certainly. Did you know my brother?”

“I knew some of his parishioners. Drumcliffe Parish, was it not?”

“Drumcliffe it was, under the shadow of Ben Bulben.”

The extortionist who claimed to be a receptionist at my hotel in Cork charged me two shillings and threepence for a ten-minute long-distance telephone call to the Links Hotel at Rosses Point in Sligo to reserve a room for the following night.

Late spring was maturing along the hedgerows in sprays of blackthorn blossom and crisp dog parsley as I motored up from Sligo through Limerick, Galway, and Ballina. My spirits matched the season. After too long in Dublin, one feels one is turning to something of the consistency of waterlogged newspaper. I enthusiastically serenaded the locals with songs and snatches from Gilbert and Sullivan. After an excellent dinner in the Links Hotel’s renowned restaurant and a couple of whiskeys in the bar with its even more renowned view over the Atlantic, I felt ready for my visit to Father MacAlvennin, Father Halloran’s successor. In Ireland, all detective work starts, and ends, with the parish priest.

Father MacAlvennin was a round-faced, cheery chap, doubtless destined for a premature coronary. From the number of detective novels hidden on his bookshelves between works of a more publicly pious stance, I judged he would be only too willing to assist me in my inquiries, as the police euphemistically put it. I sat in the amber buttoned-leather tranquility of his drawing room while he fetched the relevant parish records. He was very proud of his record keeping. His primary vocation was administrative. His ambition was to serve in the Vatican Civil Service. Eyes gleamed behind circles of glass at the thought of two thousand years of genealogies, histories, indexes, codices. He located the appropriate record in a shoe box of National Sweeps tickets and golfing scorecards—Father Halloran’s gifts had lain in a different direction entirely.

“There you have it—Sisters of Divine Visitation, in Cork. The Mother was the sister of the Father.” Only in Ireland can a sentence like the above have any logical meaning. “The child was a foundling, abandoned in a rush basket at the back door of a Mrs. Maire O’Carolan, widow of the parish. She worked for some time as a housekeeper at Craigdarragh House—the place achieved some notoriety, or perhaps fame, on account of it being the family home of the celebrated local eccentric, Dr. Edward Garret Desmond. You may recall that, in the early part of the century, he had a fanciful notion of communicating with creatures from another world by means of a giant illuminated telegraph in Sligo Bay, which consequently brought shame and ruin upon the whole family. If I remember rightly, was there not a scandal surrounding the daughter—a rape case, wasn’t it? Now, what was her name?”

I declined to proffer a nomination. Craigdarragh. The Desmonds. How often in a lifetime do we follow a certain road so far, across changing and challenging terrain, to find that it leads to its own beginning? A sense of currents moving beneath a still surface, of unseen connections and associations, crossed over me like the shadow of a cloud.

“Emily, that was her name,” the Father said, pleased at the efficacy of his memory. “There’s a strange tale told about her in the parish—that she was taken away in a cloud of red mist into Faeryland; that her child was half faery and was therefore cast out and left as a changeling on Mrs. O’Carolan’s doorstep. Idle nonsense, of course—you know how tongues wag in the country—and not the sort of thing that I would encourage in my parish, but there are many, too many, of my flock who believe the story.”

In the morning I was given a little lesson in local history over brandies by the barman at the hotel, a veritable cornucopia of local knowledge. The incredible story of the lost girl and the cloud of red fog was well known to him—he even furnished me with a list of credible witnesses to the event. I declined to follow them up. I learned from him also that Craigdarragh had been sold to a Major Ronald Costelloe, ex-North West Rifles, ex-Pukkah Sahib, who, after becoming something of a local celebrity on account of his Indian housemaid and polo ponies, finally passed into popular history under a cloud of infamy for having aided and abetted the Black and Tans in the War for Independence. Such treachery had earned him an IRA bullet in the subsequent siege and gun battle in which Craigdarragh had been reduced to a charred shell. Equipped with a pair of bird-watching binoculars and a Swiss mountain-walking stick, I motored out to the house. I parked the car in the old gateway, slipped between the rusted gates, and walked up the drive. Even on as exhilarating a late spring morning as this, the melancholy was intense. The grounds had reverted to their natural state. Rhododendrons and shrubberies were riotous, the lawn a veritable jungle. The overwhelming sensation was of the encroaching woods reclaiming an old possession. The IRA had done an uncharacteristically thorough job on the house: it was roofless and windowless; plaster was peeling away in sheets from the scorched, blackened walls; chimney stacks made stark silhouettes against the sky; there were ashes, ruin, brambles, decay. Of the lives and circumstances that had moved within those walls, in those elegant gardens, there was not a trace—not so much as a scorched piece of trim from a silk parasol. It seemed to me a sad parable of the Ireland we have created.

From the sad remains of a great house, I crossed the stile at the end of the rhododendron walk into Bridestone Wood. Twenty years can span the life and death of even as great a house as Craigdarragh, but in the life of a wood they are as an evening gone, as the hymn says. There were a few halfhearted attempts at husbandry along the edge woods, a few sawn logs, damp cones of sawdust, an unruly stab at coppicing, but for the most part I walked in a woodland that had clearly never felt the hand of man. As with all wild, untouched places, a colossal, primitive sentience seemed to reside in every twig, every leaf, every uncoiling fern and spring flower. But there was a further uncanny sensation quite peculiar to Bridestone Wood: that of being
watched.
I could well believe the warnings of the barman at the Links Hotel when he had learned of my intentions for the afternoon. “Folks say it’s haunted. Well, now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that myself, but I do know there’s a mighty odd feel to the place.” Indeed. Not quite haunted, but not quite not.

My general trend was upward, my chief goal the Bridestone. After a few hundred yards in what I felt was that general direction I found myself headed
downslope.
Reorienting myself, I followed a small stream upslope, made a small detour around a thick clump of brambles, and found myself once again disoriented. The stream which I had kept to my left sounded from my right. Presuming I had turned around inadvertently, I rectified the mistake, walked on, and found myself once again beside the dead oak I had used as my initial landmark.

By now thoroughly unnerved, I consulted the small compass built into the head of my walking stick. I followed the needle and kept my eyes on my feet. After a hundred or so paces I began to experience a mounting sense of dislocation—up, down, left, and right shifted alarmingly. I persevered, and as I pushed on I became aware of a growing sense of resistance, a kind of muscular inertia, as if the air had thickened against me. It took me twenty minutes to cover as many yards. Without warning, the pressure ceased. I almost fell over in my exertion. By my estimates, I was less than a quarter of a mile from where I had parked the car; I felt like I had run ten miles. As I puffed and panted like an old man of seventy, the most baffling of the disorientations overcame me. I was still pressing uphill, but the slope of the ground seemed to increase until I felt as if I were climbing an almost vertical wall of vegetation. The evidence of my eyes had the wood sloping gently up to the foot of Ben Bulben; the evidence of my body had me on the face of a veritable Matterhorn!

Clinging there for dear life to every available hand- and toehold, I became aware of the birds—starlings, magpies, crows, ravens, eponymous rooks, all birds of ill omen. The trees were black with them. I clung to my rootholds and watched them come flocking in. As if by command, they rose as one and came at me.

I can remember very little—thudding wings, flashing yellow beaks, scaly legs, and clawed feet. I do remember hanging from my perch with one hand and lashing out with my Swiss mountain stick in the other, smashing hollow bones, snapping beating wings; the shrieks and cries and the whirring, flapping wings all around me. Beaks lunged for my hands, my eyes, my cheeks. I was engulfed in a storm of black feathers. I lunged and parried with my stick—too far! The grass tore in my fingers and I tumbled downslope. Trees, rocks, stumps, briars, loomed before me. Miraculously, I escaped being smashed and broken upon them. I came to an eventual rest in a clump of furze not ten feet from the dead oak, bruised, scratched, mud-smeared and covered with leaf mould; otherwise, considerably more intact than I should have been after a vertical fall of a quarter of a mile.

Bridestone Wood, or the spirit that controlled it, would not permit penetration by such as I. Trembling with delayed shock, I followed the rabbit path through the edge of the woods to the Drumcliffe Road.

A brace of Napoleon brandies in the hotel bar helped the recuperation process. From my table by the window, I could see the birds still circling above Bridestone Wood across the bay.

A
FELICITOUS SUCCESSION OF
lifts and stowings-away brought them to the Boyne Valley, and the tombs, by early evening. Six millennia of legend and story had woven around the megalithic cemeteries of Knowth, Dowth, and Newgrange a nexus of mythlines too powerful to block at the source. Five years before, Tiresias and Gonzaga had fought for a season weaving a complex double spiral of gyruses about the minor nodes and octave points, isolating the tombs’ Mygmus energy from the countryside mythline pattern. The Boyne Valley remained a key strategic site. If the Adversary were to regain control of the phagus-generating energies focused there by six thousand years of human imagination, the entire process of containment could be threatened. Proto-phagus forms were abroad, boiling out of the earth like heat haze; every hedge and thicket seemed to harbour a leering Firbolg or Jack-in-the-Green. The sense of flow along the mythlines toward the focus at the tombs was so overpowering that Tiresias was forced to dispense with his spectacles. Gonzaga was not so blessed; he could not turn off his senses so easily. He walked as if bothered by a bad conscience, pausing every so often to twitch and shake the voices out of his head.

The dark was drawing down by the time they reached the first gyrus. It had been sited on a minor chordal node on a wooded knoll known as Townley Wood by the riverward entrance to an old country seat abandoned in the War of Independence. They groped in the twilight through the debris left by early season picnickers. Gonzaga stuck his finger into a partly decomposed condom.

“It has, since long, been this one’s understanding, that Mother Ireland eschewed the use of these,” he complained.

They found the gyrus by the last glow of the sun between the trees. Utter destruction. The buried elements had been sniffed out and grubbed from the earth, as if by tusks, then stamped into nothingness. As a final act of destruction, the centre of the small clearing had been scorched. Gonzaga sniffed the air. “Pookah.”

In its contemporary form, the pookah had been demythologised by the centuries into another member of the pantheon of faeries major and minor—a rural Puck figure, generally good-natured, if prone to occasional acts of minor domestic mischief. In its ancient manifestations, the pookah had been terrible and dangerous, the spirit of the forest itself, with its roots in the racial memory of the woolly mammoth of the periglacial fringelands, haunting with tusk and claw and sinew the nights of the Mesolithic settlers.

“Good comrade, please, one moment’s perfect hush:

This one suspects a presence in this place

Not of ourselves. This one must hear and sense.”

Townley Wood was in complete darkness. Tiresias had spent too many years following the mythlines to fear the dark, yet as Gonzaga turned slowly, as elegantly as a dancer, in the fire-blackened clearing, he felt cold hands touch his spine.

Gonzaga let out a wordless cry and pointed. Tiresias had his glasses on his nose in an instant. Townley Wood was transformed into a place of pale mists and rivers of pastel light. He looked where Gonzaga was indicating. A tangled worm of luminescence was unravelling and dissolving in a shallow dell a handful of yards distant. He glimpsed faces: the horse-headed homunculus, the sea cat, the satyr, the werewolf, the wild boar … and then they were gone, absorbed back into the Mygmus.

They spent the night by the desecrated gyrus, watching, listening, waiting. Gonzaga cut two hazel branches and stripped them into long staves. While Tiresias muttered and fretted across the borderlands of the Dreamplace, he emptied his sack onto the charred ground. His fingers, like small, bright-eyed animals, moved over the strewn items, touching, weighing, selecting, rejecting. Dried flowers, shards of broken crockery, Boy’s Club badges, bones, bird feathers, scraps of cloth, holy medals, broken jewellery, coins, bottle caps; those that passed his test he attached to the staves with short lengths of twine and button thread. Motorists and other users of the Dublin Road were so surprised by the sight of two tramps waving what looked like portable maypoles at them that, needless to say, they did not even slow down, let alone offer them a lift.