Woman Who Spoke to Spirits

by Alys Clare

  Tamáz straightened and stood up. He had tears streaming down his face. He walked slowly back to his boat and, coming aboard and noticing her eyes on him, nodded. ‘I have given him to the water,’ he said.

  She stayed with Tamáz and the girl for the rest of the night, checking on her patient regularly to make sure she wasn’t bleeding again, comforting her once or twice when she woke and cried.

  Then, towards dawn, noticing her rubbing at her back, Tamáz said to Lily, ‘Go back and lie in my crib for a while. I will watch.’

  She realized, from the direction in which he was nodding, that he was referring to the larger bed, behind its curtain. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Very gratefully she crept onto the bed, and he drew up a soft woollen blanket to cover her. The pillow under her cheek was rough linen, and it too smelt of lavender and herbs. The pain in her back eased and she slipped into a doze.

  When she opened her eyes, dawn was beginning to lighten the eastern sky. She pushed back the blanket and sat up. Tamáz, coming to sit on the edge of the bed, handed her a mug of tea, and she didn’t think she’d ever tasted anything more welcome.

  ‘Is she still asleep?’ she asked, nodding at the girl.

  ‘Yes.’ Moving closer, dropping his voice to a soft whisper, he said, ‘I will tell you about her. She is from Ireland, and she is of the kin of my paternal grandmother, although we are but distantly related and, until very recently, had never met. She was raped by one of her father’s good friends and when she managed to tell her mother what had happened, and that she thought she had been damaged inside, she was not believed. Her father accused her of having lain with some village lad and told her she would be sent to the laundries. You understand about the laundries?’

  ‘I do,’ Lily murmured, for she knew and abhorred the system by which young girls in repressively Catholic Ireland who were sometimes pregnant outside marriage, sometimes guilty of no more than being lively and flirtatious, were dispatched to the Magdalene Laundries where, under the stern eyes of nuns, they worked, sometimes for years, and where, if they had been sent there pregnant, they gave birth and had their babies taken away from them.

  ‘You will understand, then, why Maeve preferred to run away,’ Tamáz said.

  Maeve, Lily thought, her name is Maeve. In all the drama and the fierce emotion of the night, she hadn’t thought to ask. ‘Of course I do,’ she said.

  ‘She stole money and paid her fare to Liverpool,’ Tamáz went on, ‘and there she managed to contact a cousin who had also run away, some years back, and who now like me lives on a boat. The cousin wanted to help but her man refused to allow it, it seems because he carries the fear of the priesthood with him yet and will not go against what has been deemed to be right. Maeve, he said, was a fallen woman and he’d have no truck with her and her bastard.’ He sighed. ‘The woman – Maeve’s cousin – is my friend, as well as also being a distant relation of mine. She asked me to take Maeve with me, for her man was threatening to write home and tell the family she was here. So I did.’ He sighed again, rubbing his hand through his beard. ‘That was two months ago, and she’s been with us on the Dawning ever since.’

  After quite a long time Lily said, ‘What will happen to her now?’

  ‘Now, with no illegitimate child to hamper her, she will return to her cousin, who has promised to find a position for her. In service,’ he added. ‘The cousin has done the same for other young relations who have made their way to England from Ireland. She’ll be all right,’ he assured her.

  ‘Will she?’ Lily said bleakly.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied very firmly. ‘Can you not see that any life is better than what she would have had? To be in service will seem like freedom to her, in comparison.’

  ‘Yet it’s not freedom,’ she said.

  He looked at her for some time. ‘Which of us is free?’ he asked softly.

  Later he saw her home.

  He stood with her outside her house. It was early still, and nobody was about. ‘Lily Raynor. Lillibullero,’ he said quietly, smiling down her.

  ‘What did you say?’

  His smile broadened. ‘Lillibullero. It’s the name of an ancient Irish song.’

  She turned, reaching for her door key. He caught hold of her hand, detaining her, and dropped a soft kiss on her cheek. ‘Goodbye, Lily Raynor,’ he said. ‘Until we meet again.’

  Then he turned and strode away, and the white mist of an autumn morning that was rising off the water soon swallowed him up.

  She has seen Tamáz twice since then. The first time was heralded by the arrival of a letter, with her name and address written in a very beautiful hand which looked like a work of art. The letter said:

  I have news of Maeve and if you would like to know how she does, I shall be moored in the boat basin tomorrow evening.

  It was signed, as she knew even as she had looked down at that stylish handwriting, Tamáz.

  The month was January, and it was a cold night. Something warned Lily against leaving for her assignation via the front door of 3, Hob’s Court, although she could not have said what it was. Not for fear of the Little Ballerina, newly installed as her lodger, overseeing her movements; for she was at the theatre and would be until after midnight. She wrapped herself warmly, went through the house to the rear door, locking it behind her, stepped hurriedly down the garden and, unfastening the heavy padlock, went into the shed at the far end. The shed was very large, running the width of the narrow garden, and her grandparents had used it for the preparation of remedies. Accordingly, it was very secure: the rear door, opening into a narrow little passage that ran along between the back of Hob’s Court and a muddle of old sheds and warehouses on the river, not only had a lock and bolts top and bottom, but had also been fitted with two heavy wooden planks that slotted into iron brackets set into the wall on either side.

  Lily let herself out, re-locked the door and, as quiet and unnoticed as a shadow, slipped along the passage and towards the riverside.

  Tamáz was waiting for her at the end of the passage.

  She gave a shocked little cry. ‘How did you know I was on my way?’

  ‘I guessed.’ She couldn’t make out his features very well in the dim light, but she knew from his voice that he was smiling. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he went on. ‘The stove is warm on the Dawning, so we’ll go there.’

  Then they were back on his boat, drinking hot tea, cosy, and so comfortable with each other that it was as if she had known him all her life.

  He told her his news.

  ‘Maeve has recovered well. She has put her experience from her mind, and she is working hard to make a success of her new life. Her cousin was as good as her word, and found her a position as a scullery maid in a fine house in the countryside to the north of Manchester. Maeve has written to say that she has made friends, that her employees are good people, that those who have charge of her days are adequately kind to her and, to begin with, were reasonably tolerant of her ignorance of their ways.’ He looked up, as if he had sensed the protest that Lily would utter. ‘Yes, I know,’ he murmured, ‘but it’s as good a life as very many people have or aspire to, a great deal better than many.’

  He was right. Lily bowed her head and kept her silence.

  After quite a long pause, Tamáz said very softly, ‘What did you discover when you were tending her?’

  Her head shot up. She was very surprised that he had noticed. But then, because he was who he was, she wasn’t. ‘She was in my care,’ she demurred. ‘The bond between nurse and patient is sacrosanct.’

  ‘Yes. But you and I are already complicit, and you know that what is said here remains between us.’

  She did know.

  ‘There was an injury, fairly recent, suggesting very strongly that she had tried to procure an abortion.’

  He nodded, as if he had suspected it. ‘Fairly recent, you said?’

  ‘Yes. If Maeve had hoped to bring about a relatively painless sli
pping of the products of conception, she was wrong.’

  ‘She knew nothing,’ Tamáz said. ‘She was ignorant of the facts of life, of how birth happens, of the workings of the human body. When her father’s friend raped her she had no idea what he was doing, and when afterwards she found her own blood on her body, she believed he had punctured her innards. Those were her very words.’

  Lily said after a moment, ‘Then she probably does not mourn the death of her baby.’

  But he said, ‘Oh yes, she does.’

  And then there seemed nothing more to say.

  Presently he took her back to the passage, and the door into the shed, and once again he bade her goodbye and kissed her cheek.

  The second time she saw him after their initial meeting was at the end of March, on the date of what she later learned was the spring equinox. Then she was alerted to his presence because she saw him.

  Or, more accurately, she heard him. She thought she could hear music, coming from the riverside. Summoned by something so strong that it was irresistible she went to her bedroom window, at the back up on the top floor, and stared out. It was night, and she could see soft lights, shadows. She knew one of the shadows was his.

  Hurrying out through the back garden and the door into the passage, she ran all the way to the riverside, and there they were, twenty, thirty people, men, women, children, circling round a fire that burned bright and cheerful, dancing to the music played by two men and a woman on fiddle, squeezebox and banjo, twirling, twisting, now linking hands, now dancing alone. She watched for a while, her smile spreading across her face, and after a time – as if he’d been giving her the chance to understand the steps – Tamáz emerged from the darkness, took her hand and led her into the dance.

  She had no idea how long she was there. Sometimes the pace slowed, and he took her in his arms in a waltz, holding her so close that, like the poor, dead baby boy, her head was held to his heart. That night, when he saw her back to her door, he whispered, ‘Goodnight, cushla macree.’

  Or that was what it sounded like.

  Now it is Tamáz that Lily must speak to.

  Tamáz, with his strange mixture of forebears and his early life with the Irish boatmen and women who took him in for love of his late paternal grandmother the Irish matriarch, is the man to ask about messages from beyond, for without ever having asked, she is quite sure he is well versed in the ways of the spirit world.

  Now, on this night of fear after her first seance, Lily goes home and waits for him to find her.

  She is watching from her bedroom window and she sees his dark shape in the alley behind the house. She hurries down, grabbing her shawl, and emerges through the shed. He nods to her in greeting and they walk together back to The Dawning of the Day. He tells her to sit down and he makes tea. Then he says, ‘You have felt a strong emotion this night. Fear, I think, and deep, deep sorrow.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  She tells him about the seance. About the extraordinary way that Albertina picked up on the death of her father. She also admits to the very strong sense of menace that she felt.

  He lets her talk without interruption, and it takes some time. When she has finished, he sits in thought for a further time.

  ‘Did she describe your father’s death accurately, in the precise way that it happened?’ he asks eventually.

  ‘I don’t know how it happened, not in any detail,’ she replies. ‘Nobody would tell me. They said I would be too upset, which was incomprehensible because I couldn’t possibly have been more upset than I was.’ She takes a steadying breath. ‘But she – Albertina – described it in just the way I see it in my imagination.’

  He nods slowly, a faint smile on his lips, as if she has just confirmed something.

  After a long silence, he says, ‘I cannot say for sure what is the truth of it. I do not believe that those we love are able to contact us after death, for all that a clever and skilled medium may try to convince us of it. Yet I too have experienced the inexplicable.’

  She feels the very faintest brush of dread, and sees again that image of spreading black mould. But he says swiftly, ‘There is nothing to fear, Lily, not here and now.’ He pauses again, then says, ‘I believe there may be a way in which men and women communicate without speech. It usually occurs only where there is great love, and it is perhaps the love that opens the channel.’ He pauses again. ‘This I have experienced for myself. Once I wished to ask my grandmother a question, and when next I saw her, she told me the answer before I had spoken. Another time, I knew when a boy I was close to as a child had been in an accident and I went to find him.’

  She nods. She knows there’s no use asking for more details because he won’t give them. Tamáz is a man who only tells you things when he is ready.

  He sighs, turns his inner eye from whatever events in his history he has been contemplating and says, ‘If you wish me to give an opinion, Lily, then I will tell you only this: that I believe all of us carry the major events of our past with us for the rest of our lives, and that there are some people who are able to look into our minds and pick up these memories.’

  She murmurs, ‘Yes.’ It makes sense to her.

  ‘And the woman who saw the image of your father falling to his death was able to perceive it not because of a message from the other side, but because you had it in your mind, as you always do.’

  She does. He is quite right. She mutters, ‘Yes,’ again, more softly.

  ‘You say you felt a threat? A menace?’ he goes on.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you will, I assume, be returning to this place?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He nods. He doesn’t try to dissuade her. He reaches inside his waistcoat and shirt and extracts something on a long silver chain, lifting the chain over his head and holding the object out to her. It is a little bottle, about the length of a forefinger, and some two fingers in breadth. It appears to contain nails, pieces of wire … One long nail, several shorter ones, some barbs, a coil of wire sharpened to a point.

  ‘This is a witch’s bottle,’ he says very softly. ‘My grandmother Mary Bridey made it for me when I was small and afraid of the night walkers of the Fenlands. It keeps all harm away.’ He puts the bottle on its silver chain – both still warm from his body – over her head.

  She touches the little bottle cautiously. ‘Don’t you need it?’

  He smiles. ‘I no longer fear the night walkers. Besides, just now I believe that the darkness is more of a threat to you.’ He puts his big, warm hand around hers, closing hers tightly around the bottle. ‘Stay safe, cushla.’

  SEVEN

  Felix decides quite soon upon arriving in Tunbridge Wells that he rather likes the town. He follows a sign to the left-luggage office, situated across a bridge and on the ‘up’ line, and deposits his small overnight bag. Then he re-crosses the bridge and walks out of the railway station, where he sees the road climb up a steep hill to his left. In the opposite direction, this same road curves round to the right, slightly downhill, and the High Street branches off it. Felix goes back inside the station and asks the station master how to find the Dippers’ Steps Theatre.

  ‘Ah, now, you want to make your way to the Parade!’ the station master exclaims with such abundant cheerfulness that it’s as if Felix’s request is precisely what has been lacking to make his day. ‘You go straight down the High Street – that’s over there, where it says High Street – then cross the road at the end and go into Chapel Place. Don’t you turn right or left, mind!’ Felix assures him that he won’t. ‘Then at the far end of Chapel Place you’ll go round the back of King Charles the Martyr’s chapel – that was Charles the First, the one what had his head cut off – and go straight across the road, and the Parade will be just in front of you. You’ll find the Dippers’ Steps Theatre on your right, and a pretty little place it is too!’

  Felix thanks him and sets off.

  The High Street is busy with Thursday morning shoppers, stroller
s, delivery boys and gossips, and there is a pleasant buzz of activity. Felix crosses Chapel Place, having remembered not to deviate to right or left, then hurries over another busy road, and he finds himself in the Parade.

  The Dippers’ Steps Theatre is just where the station master said it would be, and it is equally as pretty as he promised. Intrigued by the name, Felix stops to read a notice set in the wall beside a recessed space – a sort of well – where reddish-coloured water bubbles up. The notice informs him that if he wishes to take the waters, a Dipper will be in attendance between the hours of 2 and 5pm every Tuesday and Friday. There is a further sign that urges him to do so, the waters from the chalybeate spring being extremely beneficial in the treatment of a wide array of ailments. Looking at this water, Felix is quite glad that today is Thursday.

  He turns his attention to the theatre. The entrance is framed by two elegant pillars at the top of a short flight of shallow steps. The walls are painted white and the roof is made of small red tiles. There are framed posters to right and left of the doors, one advertising the present production and one next week’s offering. The taste of the citizenry of Tunbridge Wells appears to be for light melodrama.

  He runs up the steps and tries the door, which opens. He can hear sounds of activity from within: loud voices from the auditorium, straight ahead – or perhaps, he thinks, that should be well-projected voices, for these surely are members of the company rehearsing the next production. To the left is the ticket office, at present unoccupied, and to the right a little passage leads off into darkness. Felix follows it and presently comes to the open door of an incredibly busy-looking office. At second glance he realizes that in fact there’s only one occupant, shouting at someone invisible who is apparently somewhere further along the passage, and that the impression of busyness has come about because the office is filled to bursting with papers, books, files, a vast desk, too many chairs, a battered chaise-longue and a large rubber plant.