by Ian McDonald
Merchant’s Quay was another of those periodic reminders one comes across with too great a frequency of the grim days from which our nation is only slowly emerging. Elegant town houses built to the refined tastes of the mercantile class of seventeenth-century Cork had been reduced to blackened facades shored up against the final collapse into the waters of the Lee by batteries of timbers and props. In any other city they would have been long ago demolished as an affront to civic pride; in rebel Cork, always on the wrong side of any uprising, they were maintained as a memorial to the Black and Tan’s barbarity. In the entire row only one house had survived. There is always one that obdurately holds out when the fire passes, when the people move out, when the developers move in. This doughty survivor was a Mrs. MacCurtain, ninety-two, and bent treble with arthritis. She took it upon herself to invite me in for tea and fruit brack while she recollected that November night.
“There were only two deaths, though I don’t know whether to be thankful that there were so few, or angry that they were any at all. From number eight, they were. The Mannions. Both of them died in the fire. They got cut off—the fourth floor, do you see? When the Fire Brigade came the Tans slashed their hoses, would you believe? They stretched out blankets, so, for them to jump, and everyone was out in the street, shouting jump, jump, for Christ’s sake, jump! Never mind that their own homes were going up in flames before their very eyes, they were beyond saving, but there still might be hope for the man and the woman and the baby. Did I say they had a little girl? They did, so, no age at all, God love her, for such a terrible thing to be happening to her. The father, he was about to throw the little girl out, and his wife next, but suddenly there was a great whoosh of flame and the roof came down and, well, there was nothing we could do for them. But the little girl was still alive. The window bay had protected her, you see? We all shouted for her to jump, but she was afraid, she was so high up, and she no more than four.
“Then out of the crowd walked these two tinkermen. We didn’t know who they were, where they came from, what they were doing there, but before anyone could say a word, they walked into the house; into the fire, would you believe? Straight in. Now, I was there, I will tell you what I saw, with my own eyes, and that was that the one who went in first, a small, swarthy man, like an Eyetalian, he was scattering what looked like dust from a bag over his shoulder, and when the dust fell, the flames died down. The next we saw of them, they were up in the window beside the girl. We all shouted, ‘Throw her down, Throw her down!’ but the other one, the tall, thin one, he picked her up in his arms and turned away, as if he meant to come back through the fire. They hadn’t gone two steps when all of a sudden there was a tremendous boom! Must have been a gas main going up, or something, and this ball of fire blew the rest of the windows out. I tell you, the flames shot up one hundred feet, so they did, and it was a fireman himself told me that, so. Well, we all thought, there’s another two poor brave idiots gone to their Maker, and the little girl with them, poor thing. Why hadn’t they listened and done like we’d said and thrown her out? But then what did I see, but the flames in the hallway snuffed out like a candle and the two of them come walking out with the little girl like they were on a Sunday afternoon walk on Crosshaven Promenade. They set the little girl down and in all the rush and haste they had disappeared through the crowd before anyone thought to talk to them. Hadn’t even stopped to be thanked, and we never knew who they were or where they had come from. They came and went without a single word. But for them there’s not one would have survived in number eight. And I know what I saw with my own eyes, and other folk will tell you what they saw with theirs, and what happened is a miracle, a real Hand of God miracle.
“I tell you this one last thing: after the fire, the brigade checked their blankets and tarpaulins we’d wanted them to jump into, and they said they were so old and worn that anyone who jumped in would have gone straight through. Straight through. So that tall, thin one, he must have known, though don’t ask me how, because we’ll never know, none of us.”
I asked what had happened to the little girl. Mrs. MacCurtain replied that she had been taken by a sister who lived in Dublin, and had later married a Protestant. It was not a mixed marriage; the woman in question had been confirmed into the Church of Ireland, a thing she regarded as an outrage to nature.
Satisfied, I was preparing to leave when Mrs. MacCurtain piped up like a little bird with a final reminiscence.
“Oh, yes, I quite forgot to tell you, Mr. Rooke. This was a strange thing. When the little girl was adopted by Mrs. Mannion’s sister, it was the child’s second adoption in almost as many years. You see, she had already once been adopted, so, by the Mannions. Poor old Mrs. Mannion was told by the doctors she could never have any children of her own, a dreadful curse to visit upon a woman,” (she crossed herself devoutly) “so she adopted a little girl from the Sisters of Divine Visitation.”
I was surprised to find that the nuns of Visitation Convent were not a foundling order. Presented with an orphan, I had automatically placed her in an orphanage. The Sisters of Divine Visitation were a brisk and bustling missionary order engaged in good works of supererogation across four continents. Their convent on the Mallow Road out of Cork was bright, clean, modern, and clearly very well-funded. The current Mother Superior was a fresh-faced, dynamic, almost aggressive woman in her early forties. Sister Agnes, her predecessor, had retired from supervision of the sisters five years before at the venerable age of seventy-four. A skipping teenage novice (too worldly by far ever to make a success of life in orders) took me to the cloister garden where Sister Agnes liked to spend clement afternoons in the sunlit recollection of the past. Sister Agnes was a tiny bone of a woman. Seeing her wheelchair among the buddleias and fuchsias, I made the error of mistaking serenity for senility: her recall was instant and total.
“Such a dear little thing—like a daughter to us all, a ray of sunshine in our close community. Women in close community can be such terrible old bitches. Sisters in Christ no exception. But little Bernadette-Mary brought out the good in us—all these maternal feelings that a vow of celibacy is supposed to dissolve away like smoke, which, of course, it doesn’t. She was very tiny when she came to us, a mere babe in arms. I suppose we should have given her over to one of the foundling orders, but, one sight of her, well, could you? We had her baptised at once and hired a wet nurse from Grangegorman, a poor woman who’d just lost her fifth, and she looked after Bernadette-Mary until she was weaned. After that she stayed with us here in the convent, and she would probably still be here if the bishop hadn’t heard about the child. There was a terrible to-do, we just managed to keep it out of the papers. The thought had never occurred to us, you see, but everyone would have thought the child was one of ours, and that would have been a terrible scandal, indeed. The bishop insisted we have the child adopted at once. We approached the woman who’d wet-nursed her, but she had her hands full with her second attempt at a fifth, so, after much searching—I was very particular about who would look after our Bernadette-Mary—she was put with a couple called Mannion. Nice people, they were. We were all very sad to see her go. Something went out of the convent the day she left to go to her new parents. She was almost three.”
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.
10
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.