More Miracle Than Bird Read online

  She waited before following the others down one flight of stairs, two, three, all the way to the bottom. In the cellar there were perhaps twenty women, all nurses, and they all stood and stared up at the ceiling, as if daring it to fall.

  One of the girls was leading a prayer, but Georgie stood apart from the others. She wondered what was happening at the hospital, which was not far from here, whether the men were all right. Mrs. Thwaite would be with them. Above the ground, above the buildings, a zeppelin must be looming like a great ship of the sky. Right now, did it hang directly above them? Right now, did a man look down over the clouds, down on London? Was he poised, his finger hanging over—what was it? A switch, a button, a lever?

  Vielleicht jetzt? Oder jetzt?

  Another crash from above. One of the girls screamed. Georgie kept her eyes on the ceiling; if it fell in, she would see the first brick crack.

  Instead the sirens stopped, and after a few minutes, Georgie headed for the stairs. One of the girls called up to her, “Where are you going?” They were all clustered together.

  Georgie stopped on the first step. “I just want to have a look.”

  “You’ll get yourself killed.”

  Georgie looked down at the cluster of women. Next to her, two of the other nurses were grasping one another’s hands and staring up. She would not die in a basement. Maud Gonne’s husband had been shot in Ireland, and Willy Yeats had rushed to her side. She would not die thinking about a man who had gone to propose to another woman. If a bomb was going to hit them, they would die whether they were in a basement or out on the street. She’d prefer to be hit looking at the sky. She ran up the steps.

  When she reached the main corridor, she unhooked her blue cloak from the wall and put it on over her nightgown, wrapping it around her as she headed outside and towards the hospital.

  The air was dusty, and Georgie put her hand up to shield her eyes from a thick weave of smoke. The early morning light slithered through the haze, and she could see a couple of silhouettes ahead of her, hear them calling to one another. She tipped her head back and was disappointed that the sky was empty. Some weeks back, one of the other nurses had seen a zeppelin: “slow and floating and otherworldly.”

  At first, beyond the smoke, Georgie could see no evidence that a bomb had fallen. But as she walked and the air cleared, she could see, a few blocks away, another thick shudder of smoke peeling off into the air. She ran towards it—until the air was filled with chunks of fine ash, and she slowed to a walk and held her hand over her mouth. She turned down an alley, and through to the main street, where the large apartment building on the corner looked as though a giant had passed by and shoved his fist down on one side.

  The western part of the building had remained intact, but the eastern wing had collapsed, and the smoke was spreading from a small line of fire burning in one corner, orange-gold, greedy flames. You could see where the building should be, where the straight lines failed, where everything had turned to smoke. The road was covered with bricks, sprayed everywhere, toppled like unfinished sentences. A few metres from Georgie a crowd was gathering, an ambulance; two white-coated men were running into the smoke with a stretcher—but Georgie turned before she could see any bodies. The hospital was many blocks from here; she wondered if this was the only bomb to fall. She walked around the other side of the building, stepping over a stray brick that only minutes before had been part of a wall. Most of the bodies would be inside, underneath, crushed, perhaps some still living, perhaps some cycling through their last thoughts, staring at what had been their ceiling, brought down on their heads. How lucky not to have been inside; how blessed to be able to look across at this destruction from an unharmed, living body. Georgie took a handful of the loose material of her nightgown, creased it in her fist, and squinted against the dust and smoke. She leapt over a stray brick, like a horse clearing a jump, and started to run in her slippers, ran all the way from the building until the air began to clear, until she saw a man crossing the road in front of her.

  And it was him. She couldn’t mistake the walk; everyone knew that stride. She unclenched her fist, letting her nightgown loose, and waved to stop him—and his pace stuttered for a second, when he saw this dusty, oddly clad creature.

  “Willy,” she said, although she had never before called him this to his face. “Hello.”

  He stopped. “Hello, Georgie.” He didn’t seem surprised to see her. He kept both his hands in his pockets and glanced back over at the swathes of smoke. He seemed older, his skin looser in his cheeks, his pince-nez drooping over his nose.

  “I hadn’t realised you were in London.” She had not meant it to sound like an accusation. She found it almost disappointing, the suddenness with which he had appeared on the street without warning, the way he could so carelessly inhabit the same world as her.

  “I arrived this morning. And I’m afraid I’m already late to meet a man at my club.”

  “So early?”

  “I’ve had a damnable time of it.” They’d both turned to look at the collapsed building, although all that was visible now was great clouds of dust. “These raids are fond of my neighbourhood.”

  “But you’re all right.”

  She was still exhilarated from seeing the building, and now him—he started to walk and she quick-stepped alongside him—one breath stumbled into the next, and the next, all caught high in her chest. She scanned the sky one last time for the zeppelin.

  “Did you see it?” she said.

  He shook his head. “I thought all this was quite entertaining at first, but now I’ve had enough.” She felt as if she should stop walking a moment just to breathe, but his pace had quickened further.

  “I’ll walk with you. It’s on my way,” she lied. “I heard you were in France.” As he walked, he held himself strangely, his bulk no longer pushed forward by its usual thrust from within. He stopped on the corner. He peered down as if to assess the asphalt, while tugging a handkerchief from his breast pocket.

  His uncertainty made her bolder. “Is it true then, about you and Maud Gonne? Am I to congratulate you?”

  Watching him, Georgie realised that the poet’s habit of appearing to look into infinity could simply be explained by his being shortsighted. His mouth opened, and he made a little puffing sound, as if he were trying to produce cigarette smoke without a cigarette.

  “No,” he said. “There is a certain amount of politeness needed in these situations. I am fond of Maud. MacBride’s head was on the chopping block. I had to support her. I proposed to her out of a sense of duty, you understand. The children need a guardian. It was more about the children. She has never had any interest in marrying me. That was why I didn’t tell you.” He was holding out his handkerchief like an offering. “The situation in Ireland changed everything. Maud thinks it has given the Irish cause tragic dignity.”

  She didn’t want to hear what Maud thought. “Did you know the people who did it?”

  He nodded. “One was a beautiful girl from Sligo—but she had turned very bitter. One of the men was a poet, wrote an excellent book on English prosody. MacBride—well. I’m writing about it. If only the conservatives had said they wouldn’t rescind the Home Rule bill, none of it would have happened.” He shook his head and looked right at her. “I went to Maud out of duty. We have a history, but there was never any real question of it going forward. I hope you understand that.”

  He folded the handkerchief before tucking it into his pocket, frowned at it, and pulled it out again and shook it in the dusty air. “I don’t know how you keep these things neat.” He sounded old, confused.

  “May I?” Georgie took the handkerchief from him, folded it, and handed it back. He held it in his hand, without returning it to his pocket. What did it mean to have a history? They, also, had a history! Watching him, she was furious.

  He was nodding benignly. “My dear, I’ve been rotten, I know, but I promise I’ll make it up to you. I’m here now. I can’t go to the Order tomo
rrow—I have a meeting—but you must come to my At Home in a fortnight. You will come, won’t you?” He paused. “I will make it up to you,” he said again, and looked at her with a fierceness. “All journeys have their—obstacles.”

  She hesitated. In a moment he had his arms around her, and although she was angry with him, she was also relieved. All of it was too exhausting.

  “Forgive me,” he murmured into her hair, and he kissed her hairline. She kept her eyes open and watched the dust continue to rise around them. When they broke apart, they said their goodbyes and she headed back to the dormitory. She felt as though he’d handed her a book, and she’d opened it to find each page blank.

  When she arrived at the hospital an hour later, she found a nurse on duty sweeping up wet glass, as two carafes had smashed on the floor with the bomb’s impact. Another nurse was leaning a painting against the wall, below where it had fallen. The matron was nowhere to be seen.

  “I spent a lot of time examining that thing.” Pike’s eyes were huge, the white parts milky and lined with red veins. He was looking at the painting, which the nurse had wedged against the wall with a low table. Georgie followed his gaze.

  “Do you think she wanted to go with him?” Pike said. He was staring at the canvas, with its two brown figures on the shore, and an enormous ship out on the ocean, flying crimson pennants. In the background were ruined arches covered in ivy, clouds blowing up like tissue paper.

  “I’m sorry?” She was thinking of Willy, the gathered, hard wrinkles around his eyes.

  Pike gestured to the painting, and Georgie peered closer. There was a small gold plaque displaying the title: Paris Abducts Helen from the House of Menelaus, Thus Triggering the Catastrophic Sack of Troy.

  Thus Triggering. She smiled.

  “Do you think she meant to go?” Pike said again. “Or do you think he forced her?”

  She examined the painting. “I think those brown smudges barely look like people. I can’t even tell which is which, and it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine one of them is the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  Pike was clearly disappointed.

  “You like it?” she said.

  “I suppose it’s become a kind of comfort. I’ve been staring at it for weeks. You don’t ever wonder whether she wanted to go with him?”

  Georgie tried to consider his question. It depended, she thought, on who was telling the story.

  “Maybe the whole thing was her idea,” Georgie said. “Maybe she planned it herself.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Back in the dormitory she replayed the moment with Willy in her mind, but too much was missing. “Forgive me,” he had said. But for what, exactly? For proposing to Maud? For not communicating? For leaving her there on the street? Or for something that was still about to happen?

  She tried to send her mind elsewhere. Out on the street, everyone had copies of the Times tucked under their arms. The war marched on, with the stretchers loaded from the cars into the hospital, with the faint rumbling of guns from the Somme that you could even at times feel in Mayfair, with the sliced meat of a private’s leg severed with the bullet still in it. Not even the newspapers talked about the end of the war.

  Dulac had returned the ring, as promised, with the hawk and the butterfly neatly seared into the gold, and Venus and Saturn nestled on the inside. She found she liked to look at the tiny hawk and butterfly, liked to run her fingers over the scarred indentations. She kept the ring in her purse. She obviously couldn’t give it to Willy unless things felt right between them. She would keep it until then.

  Georgie took a car to a meeting of the Order, but the traffic was held up by the damage from another air raid, and she was late. When she arrived, the meeting was already in progress, so she put on her robe, checked her pigeonhole—there was a note—and slipped into a row near the back. Dr. Harkin, at the front of the room at his golden podium, was speaking. “Because the aura of the earth,” he was saying, “is the thickest and most important part of the earth as we know it.”

  All eyes were on him. The leader of the Order had his hood pulled back from his face, so you could see the deep cleft between his eyebrows and his dark, thinning curls. The candlelight caught white glints in his eyes.

  From her purse, Georgie pulled out her leather notebook, careful not to drop any of the loose pages. She settled the book on her knee, perched her pen between her fingers, and began to take notes.

  “In the fourth layer of the earth’s aura,” Dr. Harkin was saying, “spirits reside who are sufficiently advanced to become teachers. They draw their energy from the thoughts of people here on earth and communicate through those of us who have the correct training.”

  Behind the podium, the wall hangings showed the tall, grey-bricked Tower, the golden-lit face of the Hierophant, the Hanged Man dangling upside down from a hairy rope. In between the wall hangings, blackout blinds were fixed tightly against the windows to ensure no one could peer in at the meeting from the street. She noticed that while the Hanged Man’s hands and feet were pale, his face was scarlet, all the blood gone to his head.

  “The seven layers of the earth are made of complex matter,” Dr. Harkin was saying, “and the communicators cannot pierce through the layers perfectly. They must speak in obscure ways. They are not immune to error or confusion. You must be patient to attain the correct level in the Order, and patient when the spirit speaks. You must not let yourself be vulnerable. Interpretation takes time. Trust in Christian Rosenkreutz, our guide. Trust in Anna Sprengel, our founder.”

  The lecture was already over; Anna Sprengel was always the last name to be mentioned. She was the Order’s founder, the Countess of Landsfeld, referred to by every new member in their first recitation: So do I commit myself, through the ancient texts found by the countess. Anna Sprengel was the love child of Ludwig I of Bavaria and Lola Montez, and it was she who had found the sacred writings—the very foundation of the Order—in a bookstore on Farringdon Road. Georgie felt connected to this woman, whose story allowed her to imagine that she too might be on the brink of some brilliant discovery.

  She was disappointed that she had missed so much of the lecture. At the podium, Dr. Harkin nodded to his assembly, and the group began to recite the Hebrew names for God—Elohim, El, Eloah, Elah. Harkin pulled his hood back down over his eyes and walked out as the crowd continued to mumble through the names. The hat was passed around; the clanking of coins could be heard as it was shuffled between hands. Georgie threw in her usual handful of coins, although she had to watch her money now that all she had were her earnings from the hospital.

  Once the chanting stopped, the silence held for a moment—a moment more—and broke. The crowds of hooded figures began pulling away their hoods, chatting to one another, some looking solemn, some laughing, some walking, alone, right for the door, others hovering in clusters to speak to one another. Georgie smiled at the members who passed her, who knew her as the Order’s best student, the friend of W. B. Yeats. She enjoyed being part of this group as well as being separate from them. Only then did she remember the note. She recovered it from her pocket and tore open the envelope. It was from Dr. Harkin.

  Nemo. Come to my office after the lecture.

  She went up the stairs to his office, and as the door was shut, she waited a moment before knocking softly.

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Harkin was alone, sitting behind his desk. He nodded to her, his face sweaty and pink. He looked like he was too hot, but he had his robe on over his coat, and he had wrapped a scarf around his neck. She hoped he hadn’t heard about her going to Miss Radcliffe’s.

  “Malaria’s playing up again,” he said. She had heard him boast before about when he had contracted the disease—in Uganda, when he was the physician to King Mutesa. It always led to the story of how the king had decided he would murder all the Anglicans, and how Harkin had survived only by agreeing to take three envoys to London to meet the queen. How warmly she had received them at the palace.
But today the doctor’s gaze was unfocused as he stared out at the door.

  There was no chair for her to sit on, so she stood in front of the desk. Eventually he looked up at her from his chair.

  “I asked you here because you’re a fine student, Nemo.”

  She waited.

  “You’re a fine student, and I think you might become a real leader here. Have you considered that?”

  She frowned. Harkin’s eye was twitching, and he raised two fingers to the edge of his eye and pressed. He paused. “I’ve built all this. I need some help to keep it going. It’s not entirely in my power to appoint you—it would be a matter for the Higher Members—but I would like you to consider putting yourself forward.”

  “As a leader?”

  “A kind of associate. I would be grateful for the help.”

  “What sort of help?”

  “I won’t be here forever, Nemo. I need a successor. Nobody’s ever done quite so well as you have in our organisation. I admire your approach, and I believe you’d be a real asset. Of course, I do need your assurance you won’t dabble in anything else. No mediums, certainly. This is a real opportunity to shape the spiritual explorations of the future. Once you’ve passed your examination, we can move forward, if you wish it.”

  He stared back at her with his brow crushed, his face sweaty, and his drink half drained. She made herself look right at him, at the yellowed whites of his eyes.

  “Do you wish it?”

  She could not stop herself smiling as she nodded.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  PIKE

  She had become gentler with him. Something had changed in her. Colonel Fraser had come to calling her “the second lieutenant’s girl,” and she simply ignored him, did not argue. Every time Pike heard this he felt a little warmer, a little more hopeful.

  She came by to check on his feet.

  “Do you know your Plato, Miss Hyde-Lees?”