King of Morning, Queen of Day (26 page)

“Listen.”

“What?”

“Listen… I can hear them. I can’t see them, but they’re here.”

“What?”

“The birds. They’ve followed us. They’re here.”

“Nonsense. Birds don’t fly at night.”

“These birds do.”

“Come on, will you, and stop standing there gawking like an eejit. You want the farmer to catch us?”

“I thought you said this was a safe farm.”

“It was; back in twenty-one, twenty-two.”

“You’re trying to tell me they allowed eight-year-olds in the IRA?”

“Things don’t change much in the country.”

“Just how safe is this safe house?”

She could just discern a facial expression in the dim sky-glow.

“Safe-ish.”

Safe-ish. It had been a mindless impulse, to put space between herself and the hurt of a betrayal that was still too tender to fully admit, but that was what she wanted, to be driven by impulse—her own impulse, for once, not the endless whirring machinations of others. Damian came, cautiously, with bread and a map.

“No toast?”

“No butter, no marmalade, no fire.”

She ripped at the bread with her small white teeth. Damian measured off distances on his map with his fingers.

“Will we get to Sligo today, do you think?”

“Maybe. With luck. Have you thought about what you want to do when you get there?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care. Might just turn right around and go straight home. I need time to think, to sort out what I feel, who I am.”

The sun was low and brassy in the mist as they stole away from the hay barn through the gathered birds. Every click, every clack, every rustle of feathers and flap of wing, sent Jessica’s pulse racing. They passed down a boreen that led to the main road. The hedgerows were sharp and brilliant with beaks and eyes. As they turned into the road, they heard, all at once, the storm of wings rising. They did not look behind them. For half an hour after, a river of birds passed overhead into the northwest.

D
AMN CALDWELL! WHAT MAD
notion had possessed the man to try on the glasses? We had been within minutes of them. Even now they could be approaching Sligo while we remain sequestered in the Mullingar County Hotel waiting for Caldwell to regain normal vision, if he ever does. Every half hour we remove the heavy bandages from his eyes, but even the darkened hotel room is agony to him. Tiresias cannot predict how long it will be before he is sufficiently recovered to move. Damn the man!

Obviously, we cannot leave him in the room and continue the pursuit ourselves. Neither can I carry it on alone, as we will have need of Tiresias and Gonzaga’s arcane abilities. They cannot go ahead without me as they cannot drive. Indeed, they seem loath to use any mode of transport more sophisticated than their own two feet. So we remain stuck in this down-at-heel country hotel like some Marx Brothers comedy. I was a fool to have let Caldwell accompany us.

“Guilt” is not a word with which psychologists have any truck, yet I feel guilty. She had left no note, but I was certain our sessions together were the direct cause of her flight. I had been so careful, plugging and caulking every chink and crevice, yet those constrained memories had seeped out. Memories not merely of her forgotten childhood and its traumas, but, more perilously, of the inheritance she has from her true mother. Responsibility, guilt: psychologist, heal thyself.

Jessica had been late for her appointment. My anticipation had been high, almost feverish, of being able to induce, at will, the state of primal consciousness in which the human mind interacts with matter and energy. I can only describe the sensation as the intellectual vertigo of standing upon a cliff edge overlooking a new landscape, vast and exhilarating, awaiting one’s tentative explorations.

And, of course, she was late.

Twenty minutes became forty, became an hour and a half. I was sufficiently agitated to call Mangan’s Restaurant, where she worked, and was informed that she had not been present for work that day. I called the Caldwell house—perhaps she had been taken ill and had neglected to tell Miss Fanshawe. Forboding began to grow in me when I learned that she had left the house before any of them had been awake, though it was not an unusual thing in itself. I told Mr. Caldwell of my call to the restaurant, and, voice suddenly filled with concern, he asked if I could call around as soon as possible. Having no further appointments that evening, I told him I would be present forthwith. Just as I was replacing the receiver, there was a loud knock at the door. I rushed to admit the visitor.

“Jessica,” I said, “what kept you? Where have you been? Come in.”

“I beg your pardon?”

In the corridor were two old men, two tramps. One was short and squat, like a toad, with a dishevelled mop of oily black ringlets; the other was tall and thin, almost a bird, wearing the most extraordinary pair of spectacles I have ever seen.

They introduced themselves as Tiresias and Gonzaga. Tiresias, the taller one, explained that they were searching for a Miss Jessica Caldwell—“the young lady” he called her, in a curiously archaic Anglo-Irish accent, like a seventeenth-century beau—and had traced a minor node of Mygmus energy to this place. Could I assist them in their search? They had information of the gravest import to impart to her.

It was as the tall, thin one was speaking that awareness dawned on me: here, standing outside my office door, were two actual mythic manifestations. These were no fleeting elfin shadows in Bridestone Wood, no half-real, half-wishful images captured on a photographic plate. Though their appearance and demeanour allied them more closely to the Lords of Little Egypt and the Counts of Con-Dom than the Ever-Living Ones and the Queen of Air and Darkness, these were
faeries
—the incarnations of the Watchman and the Spinner of Dreams.

I replied that Jessica had been undergoing a course of hypnotic therapy—obviously, this “node of Mygmus energy” to which they had alluded—and that she was long overdue for today’s appointment. Indeed, and I could not say why I felt the sudden compulsion to say what I did, she had been absent from work and missing from home all day. From the way they looked at each other, the smaller one saying something in a language that sounded like Russian, to which the taller one nodded gravely, I knew that they suspected something untoward was afoot.

We drove at once to Belgrave Road.

The family awaited me in the living room, arranged as if in a Victorian family snapshot. The sullen tautness of the atmosphere indicated to me that some altercation had taken place minutes before my arrival. The younger daughters seemed on the verge of tears. Mrs. Caldwell was the very picture of the weary and distraught Hollywood vamp, down to the cigarette clenched nervously between two fingers; Mr. Caldwell’s expression one of grim resolution in the face of withering revelation, like a member of the Russian royal family on the night of the Revolution.

I had taken the precaution of leaving Tiresias and Gonzaga in the car—they did not seem much to mind. Gonzaga busied himself down the back of the seats while Tiresias, outrageous spectacles on nose, surveyed minutely the front of the Caldwell residence. Their presence would only have provoked questions I did not desire to answer at that time.

“Go on, tell Dr. Rooke what you told us,” Caldwell said. The barely restrained tears flowed as first the older daughter, a dark-haired, just-blooming beauty called Jocasta, and the younger, a child of almost inspirational plainness, like contemporary Catholic saints, named Jasmine, told their tales.

When they had concluded, I could well appreciate Caldwell
mere
and
pere’s
expressions of numb bewilderment.

That there had been a man friend Jessica had been meeting clandestinely while her mother thought her visiting friends, or
me,
even more astoundingly, for over a month was shocking; that this male friend (if Jocasta’s testimony was to be trusted, and it seemed reasonable to me that Jessica had had at least one confidante with whom she could be wholly truthful) should have been a member of an IRA Active Service Unit was amazing. But what most staggered, and I will admit, alarmed me, was the younger daughter’s disclosure that she had been approached by the bizarre figure of a blind hurdy-gurdy man who seemed to be in possession of every detail of Jessica’s life, including the secret of her adoption. It was Jasmine who had broken this lifelong secret—she and Jessica had never liked each other, and their mutual antagonism had erupted in the devastating revelation of Jessica’s adoption on her return from an evening in the company of her IRA lover. Chastened, young, plain Jasmine fled the room in tears.

“Well, now we know why she’s gone,” Caldwell said. “If only we knew where. If only we could find her, bring her to her senses.”

“She could be any bloody place by now,” Mrs. Caldwell said curtly. “And if she’s gone with that IRA thug, my God, they could be dragging her from a lake, or she could be lying dead in a ditch with a bullet in the back of her head. At the very least, at this very moment, my God, he could be … with her …” The vamp composure broke. Sobbing uncontrollably, Mrs. Caldwell also left the room. Jocasta Caldwell now spoke.

“I think I know where he might have gone.” No premass hush beneath the dome of St. Peter’s was ever so profound as the silence that awaited her words: “She said that Damian, that’s her boyfriend, had been on at her to go away with him to his country, his own people, to Sligo …”

Caldwell did not even stop to ask if he might accompany me; I certainly would not have refused him. He scooped up coat, hat, and wallet, and we piled into my car. He did hesitate for a moment on seeing Tiresias and Gonzaga.

“Who are they?” he asked, not unreasonably. Tiresias quizzed him with his spectacles.

“It’s rather a long story. Suffice it to say that there are aspects to this case that I felt I could not reveal in front of your wife and children.” (I did explain them as we drove to our first port of call, Hannah’s Sweet Shop, which, according to Jocasta, the lovers had used as a kind of jungle telegraph. The aged Miss Hannah was pulling down her blinds for the night but, sensing our urgency, she was only too happy to oblige, provided the two tramps did not come into the shop.)

As we drove to Pearse Station and Caldwell tried to digest the unpalatable hypotheses I had served him, I recounted all I had been told to Tiresias and Gonzaga. The presence of the hurdy-gurdy man caused them considerable agitation. Gonzaga said, tersely, words that sounded like,

“Sugayff erprahh dnaillb uht eeeb tssum tt’y.”

Tiresias announced gravely: “Gentlemen, the situation is worse than we had feared, Jessica is being harried by forces that are inimical to her, though for the moment, she is ignorant of the exact power and threat of these forces.”

“You mean, her mother—Emily.”

“Precisely, Dr. Rooke.”

“What are you talking about?” Caldwell demanded.

At this hour, Pearse Station was the province of drunks and topers waiting on the last train home. Caldwell and I checked every bench, every kiosk, but none of the passengers could—indeed, were able to—remember seeing the girl in the photograph Caldwell kept in his wallet. One porter recalled having seen a girl eating sandwiches on a bench by the gents’ toilet during the seven o’clock lull, but had no memory of a tall, dark-haired, pale-skinned young man in a British Army greatcoat, which was all the description of Damian that Jocasta had given us.

In Westland Row, where we had had to leave Tiresias and Gonzaga because the station staff would not allow them on the premises, a policeman was about to arrest them on a charge of sitting in the back of an expensive motor car.

“They’re with us, Officer,” I said. The policeman nonetheless took a note of our number as we drove off. As we passed the entrance to Phoenix Park on Parkgate Street, thunder growled somewhere behind us in the east and fat drops of rain burst on the windshield. By the time we reached Maynooth, the wipers could hardly keep up with the deluge. The car, a Morgan tourer, was never designed for four passengers, least of all with the hood up. What with Tiresias and Gonzaga virtually perched on our shoulders like Long John Silver’s parrot, the thick stench rising from their damp clothing, and Caldwell starting for the handbrake at every bush and shrub and muttering, “Surely we should have passed them by now,” I may have had less pleasant driving experiences, but I am hard pressed to think of them. The tension in that car matched the grand electrical mayhem breaking behind us over Dublin. By the time we reached Kinnegad crossroads it had almost smouldered into flame. Caldwell and I exchanged heated words, burning looks, and the suggestion of blows to come in our disagreement over which road the fugitives might have chosen. It might well have come to fisticufffs, but for the intervention of our ill-smelling companions. Gonzaga thrust himself between us to keep us apart while Tiresias once more unfolded those arcane spectacles of his from their vellum wrapping, patiently cleaned off any trace of grease, put them on, and gestured for me to let him out of the car. He stood beneath the signpost, coattails flapping in the warm, wet wind, slowly describing one complete revolution before removing the glasses, polishing away the raindrops, and consigning them to the care of his waistcoat pocket. He pointed up the rain-swept Mullingar Road.

When he was wedged once more into the backseat and we were on our way toward Mullingar, Caldwell asked, seemingly innocently, “How do you know they went that way?”

“Disturbances in the mythlines, sir. As a gifted one herself, the young lady cannot cross mythlines without creating a flux—like the wake of a ship, you might say. The closer we come to her, the greater the disturbance of her passage.”

“And are we close to her? To them?”

“I would say, sir, that we are about an hour, an hour and a half behind her.”

“This wake, how do you see it? With those glasses?”

“Indeed, sir. My spectacles make the network of the mythlines that covers this country visible to the eye.”

“To any eye?”

“To any eye, though there is a certain knack to the interpretation of what one sees.”