Saving Lucia by Anna Vaught

Author:Anna Vaught
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bluemoose Books Ltd
Published: 2020-02-07T11:07:18+00:00

9

Madame Blavatsky’s London residence, Holland Park.

1889.

After Dublin, London. The Gibsons, liberated by money and unconstrained by school terms or suchlike, shuttle between Dublin residence and London; Madame Blavatsky, Violet has told me, flits too. Rumours of tosh and nonsense have not cost her all her adherents, so tonight Helena Blavatsky is talking of secrets revealed to her, and well-off people from this part of London attend a séance at her house. We are watching from a discreet distance, before we try to go in and see what lies behind Madame’s purple velvet drapes.

And I’ve asked you before. I know that everything Violet tells me to write down asks you the same question: who is mad here?

W.B. Yeats comes down the steps. He’s been having a private conversation with Madame Blavatsky. A year or so from now, he’ll be asked to resign from the London branch of the Theosophical Society after he gets together a group to raise a flower from its ashes and they tell him he’s become a disruptive influence. It’s the same year he writes his famous poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Bertha has read this; she loves poetry and tries to imbibe it from all sources. She tells me that she loved this poem in particular, with its invocation of a peaceful place where evening is full of the linnet’s wings. These passerines get everywhere and oh, for an uninhabited island to share with them! As Violet and Bertha whisper about this, about a place that is peaceful and of time to indulge in poetry, Violet, having identified the poet, who politely bids them good evening as he descends, looks at Bertha, who says she feels disappointed: He believed in this lunacy?

Well dear, why should that detract from such a beautiful poem? You know, after this he was all keen on a magical fraternity—The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—and I heard that Bram Stoker was a member. But, dear girl, you should still read Dracula. Thought: stay off the poetry of Pound, he who found the monster so endearing and called him Muss: I will not tolerate a fascist, so I’ll be banning his poetry for you, my dear girls. Now let’s go in.

I, meanwhile, am compelled to keep my cover, standing behind Blanche, evading Yeats. This could go wrong. He’d mentored the young James Joyce, seen me in my younger days: he should not see me now, in this shift in time and world; this transposition. It would... interfere. But he passes by. One day, long into the future (don’t ask me yet how I know this) Yeats’s son Michael will stand up at a Joyce conference and directly address Stephen Joyce, my naughty nephew (or is he merely misunderstood? Madness sends ripples of shame and of pain through a family), keeper of the Joyce flame. He, Michael Yeats, will identify himself as the poet’s son and ask my nephew Stephen not to destroy further records. In effect, not to further rub me out.

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