King of Morning, Queen of Day (6 page)

I do remember one more thing. As I slipped back through the french windows up to my room again, all the clocks I passed stood at quarter to four.

T
HE GOOD WEATHER BROKE
last night in a tremendous thunderstorm. It started unassumingly enough—just rambles and grumbles out beyond Knocknarea—then the sky gradually filled with black and before we knew it, lit up with lightning. The thunder rattled the windows and the storm was upon us. I have never seen the like before, trapped and roaring in the glens and valleys around Ben Bulben. Mrs. O’C was sure the world was going to end, and every time the thunder roared, I found myself agreeing with her.

It definitely spelled the end of the marvellous weather. When I looked out my window this morning the mountain was covered in grey cloud and a dismal, dreary rain was falling. I was stuck in the house all day doing jigsaws in the library and playing with the cat. How easily entertained are cats! A little scrap of wool and they are amused for hours. Lucky cats. I am bored, tired from doing nothing, and depressed. When the weather broke, it felt like the magic broke with it. Was it all just a Midsummer Night’s Dream?

S
TILL RAINING. LOOKS LIKE
it will never end. How much rain can there be in a cloud? I had always imagined that as they rained, clouds dwindled until eventually they rained themselves away to nothing. Evidently not.

I’ve been thinking—about the faeries; about the magical Otherworld so close to our own, and yet so far away; about what Mummy said about the Old Gods not really dying, only changing into the shapes of their enemies. All sorts of thoughts whirled around in my head like a kaleidoscope, wanting to fall together into a pattern that would make sense—a theory, a
hypothesis
(Daddy would be pleased. Here I am, thinking like a scientist)—but they wouldn’t. It is as if there is one magical, golden key that holds them all together and I cannot find it.

One positive thing out of today: after all my badgering and beavering (like the drop of water that wears away the mighty stone, as Daddy keeps reminding me), and, I don’t doubt, a little help from Mummy (I’m sure I heard voices raised in the breakfast room when I got up this morning), Daddy has relented and let me have the use of one of his cameras—a leather-bound brown folding portable.

O
N APPEARANCES ONLY, TODAY
is no better than yesterday, but I could feel a change in the air, in that same way you know by feel when it is going to clear up and when it is going to rain all day. By three o’clock there were patches of blue coming in from the Atlantic, and, miracle of miracles, the odd stray beam of watery sunlight. These were still far from perfect conditions, but I had no intention of losing another moment to the weather. Armed with camera and notebook, I went up into Bridestone Wood to hunt faeries. Nothing. They must be even more sensitive to the elements than we are. It was not a totally fruitless day. At teatime I noticed, as if for the first time, the carved Dutch wooden globes Daddy keeps on the dining room mantelpiece. They are hollow wooden balls painted with old maps of the world which open like Russian dolls so that the smaller globes nestle within the larger. Noticing them made something go click! in my head and all those thoughts and ideas that had been flying around loose in there began to fall together.

N
O FAERIES TODAY, EITHER
. But I could feel them as I have never felt them before at Craigdarragh—that spooky, electrical sense of
presence.

I am developing a theory about the faery: it is that our world and Otherworld lie one inside the other, like the concentric spheres of the carved Dutch globes, along different planes of being. In many ways they are alike, though I think that to us, Otherworld seems a little smaller than our world. Perhaps to Otherworld it is our world that seems the smaller. Both follow the same path around the Sun, and (here lies the significant difference) both turn, but at very different rates. In our world a day is twenty-four hours long; in Otherworld, a day can be a year from dawn to sunset. Daddy would be pleased with my next piece of reasoning: I consulted the atlas in the library and thought it all out very scientifically. Because the periods of rotation are different, there may be times when our world’s axis is inclined at a different angle from that of Otherworld, with the result that the surface of Otherworld touches, then passes through, the surface of our world. This area of intersection starts as a point, increases to a circle. Then, as the orbits progress and the axial tilts come back into line again, the zone of interpenetration diminishes again to a point. This, I think, is why Otherworld has always been associated with things of the earth—with hollow hills and the underworld. Mummy’s book makes the point that the legendary entrances to Otherworld have always been through caves and lakes. It would also explain why supernatural events are associated with the equinoxes and solstices—because it is at those dates that the shift of the axes occurs! I think that the geography of Otherworld must be very different from our World. I think there is much less sea, much more land—the Otherworldly Tir Nan Og is always placed in the far west, where we have only the empty Atlantic.

The more I think about my theory, the more it opens up before me, just like one of the magic gates to Otherworld, the moon-shadowed path that leads to the Land of Ever-Youth. I am so excited, it is as if after a long, hard climb, I have come to a high vista from which I can look out over a whole new landscape.

T
HE WEATHER IS BETTER
, brighter; there is a strong breeze off the Atlantic carrying fast white clouds upon it. I went up to the wood with a sense of expectation and was not disappointed. I saw a pookah—one of the little horse-headed men. It took me quite by surprise—all of a sudden, it just appeared out of the brambles. By the time I had recovered from the surprise and unfolded the camera, it had vanished. But at least I know that they are around. Better luck tomorrow.

I am thinking today about the faeries—how in the old days there were many manifestations of the same person; how they could be a salmon and a rowan and an eagle and a great golden cauldron all at the same time. This leads me to wonder if maybe these latter-day faeries—the pookahs and the leprechauns and the Trooping Faeries—are also forms of the same mythological characters. But they seem to me much less highly sophisticated than the early, elemental personas, almost as if they have degenerated rather than developed. This seems strange to me, so I have been doing a little more reading. The Teaching Sisters would be horrified if they knew I had been reading Charles Darwin; yet it was to his
Origin of Species
(strangely enough, one of Mummy’s contributions to the library, rather than Daddy’s) I went for help. What I read there only confirmed my suspicions. Creatures do not devolve into less sophisticated forms, but evolve into more developed, generalised ones. Which leads me, dear diary, to my most startling conclusion yet. These smaller, more specialised species of faery are the early, primitive, less evolved forms; the ancient, elemental shape-shifters who were many bodies with one person, they are the later, more highly evolved manifestations. Which can only lead to one conclusion:
Time in Otherworld runs in the opposite direction to the way it does in our world.

S
UCCESS TODAY! IN THE
morning, I came up quietly on a group of Trooping Faeries at their toilet, washing themselves in the late dew still lying in the bells of foxgloves, and managed to take a couple of photographs. I cannot say if they will come out—I am no photographer—but I hope so much they will. It is so important that I have evidence. I received the impression that the faeries knew I was there and
allowed
me to photograph them. But, if time runs the other way in Otherworld, then what I did will already have happened to them; to them, the time I start to take photographs is the time I suddenly stop.

The whole of Bridestone Wood feels strange today, as if it were not the place I have grown up beside to know and love, but a part of the ancient wildwoods of Otherworld somehow imposed onto our world. The trees seem very tall, the air full of the sounds of birds—raucous calls, flapping wings.

After luncheon I glimpsed the faery archer. This time there was no misunderstanding; she knew I was there and waited, smiling, for a full minute while I fumbled with the camera before she went leaping off through the undergrowth. Toward teatime, I stumbled across the trail of the Wild Hunt itself and followed them for the better part of half an hour. Alas, all I will doubtless have to show for my efforts will be a few blurred images of antlers silhouetted against the sky.

I am thinking about what I said yesterday about time running the other way in Otherworld. It seems to me that this might be an explanation for the mechanics of
magic,
though it makes my head spin, thinking too long about it. For example, we
wish
for something in our present (which is the same as the faeries’ present, this point where our worlds pass each other). The answer comes in our future, which is their past, because the faeries, in their future, which is our past, cause things to change about and set events in motion so that at the proper time—in our future, their past—that wish will come true. This is why magic is just what it is—
magic;
why there is no apparent link between cause and effect, because, in our direction of time, there isn’t, but to the faeries, everything is done in accordance with their arrow of time, and their laws of cause and effect. In their past, they see the effect, the wish comes true, and so in their future, they must arrange things so the past comes true. But I have the feeling that the faeries are not as strictly bound by the laws of past and present as we are; that is why, in our world, they can be both future and past forms, because they can be whatever they have remembered they were, and whatever they hoped to become.

See? I said it made my head spin if I thought too long and hard about it.

July 22, 1913

Rathkennedy

Breffni

County Sligo

My Dearest Hanny,

A thousand and one apologies. It is much much too long since I last wrote to you, much less saw you. The fault, I fear, is entirely mine, and I cannot even plead having been up to the proverbials in work. Alas, I am purely and simply the world’s worst at writing letters.

Anyway, customary salutations to you, your health, your wealth, your happiness etc., and without further ado, I shall get down to the real meat of this epistle.

My dear Hannibal, you really
must
drop whatever you are doing
at once
and come up to Sligo. There is something happening here that is so extraordinary and exciting that—

I am getting ahead of myself. Much less confusing if I were to spell things out in the natural order in which they occurred. Freddie says I am always doing that, rushing off everywhere and nowhere at once.

As you may know, the other Constance, my cousin on the Gore-Booth side of the family, had invited William Butler Yeats up to Lissadell for a few weeks. Well, of course, what with us being Brethren in Arms of the Gaelic Literary League and Green Flag Nationalists, I couldn’t let the occasion go unmarked. So I had Beddowes and the boys from the estate buff up the brass work and slap a lick of paint on old
Grania
(you remember? The venerable family steam launch) and throw a little boating-party cum picnic cum poetry reading. Among the
literati
I’d invited was Caroline Desmond (yes,
those
Desmonds, though she has nothing to do with that contraption bobbing up and down in Sligo Bay) and her daughter Emily, already at her tender years an ardent admirer of Willie’s poetry and philosophy. Yes, contrary to what you may have read in the newspapers, there is some sanity and good taste in the household, needless to say, all firmly attached to the distaff. Well, the day went capitally. The weather was perfect, old
Grania
chugged along without bursting a boiler, no one decided to bless the lough with seasickness, Beddowes didn’t have to fish any of the old spinsters of the League out of the drink with a fishhook, Willie was his usual Olympian self, the wine was actually
cool
this time, no one was ill from overeating and heatstroke at the picnic on Innisfree, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary here, you are thinking. Patience, my dear Hanny. Patience. It wasn’t until
Grania
was within sight of the Rathkennedy landing stage that the maroon went up. Willie had, inevitably, gathered a small group of sycophants around him and was regaling them with some learned gobbledygook about Celtic mysticism and the New Age when out of absolutely nowhere, Hanny, this Desmond girl, little Emily, produced a set of photographs which she claimed show legendary creatures inhabiting the woods around her home. Well, of course, with the ensuing uproar, I had to see what the excitement was about. Poor Willie was almost apoplectic, and, well, I hesitate to use stronger words, bless me! if she wasn’t telling the truth. Ten photographs, and notes on where, when, and how taken, down even to the prevailing weather conditions! Some, I will admit, left a lot to the imagination—patches of shadow that could as easily have been the branches of trees as the antlers and spear points of the Wild Hunt of Sidhe which they were claimed to be. But others were less equivocal—two of a brazen hussy dressed only in leather straps, carrying a bow the size of herself, with a smile somewhere between the Giaconda’s and a Montgomery Street madam’s. More convincing yet, one showed a congregation of six little woodland nymphs washing themselves, for the love of heaven, Hanny! in the petals of a foxglove. And, most irrefutable of all, the final two in the sequence—the first, of a little naked mannequin with the head of a horse, and one of herself smiling at a tiny, winged woman sitting in the palm of her hand, combing her long hair with minuscule fingers.