Bloomsday. June 16th. Blooms’ Day. So called because Irish writer James Joyce set his groundbreaking novel, Ulysses, on this date in 1904—to honour the day he first stepped out with his muse, lover, and eventual wife, Nora Barnacle.

The book is set in that single day in Edwardian Dublin but its genius speaks every day.

And to people the world over. So don’t be surprised if you spot people in straw boaters, bow ties and Edwardian dress wandering a street near you, as book lovers from Sydney to São Paulo indulge their devotion to a novel they may never have finished, and a town they may never have visited.

.

The day is named not after Nora Barnacle-Joyce but the fictional Blooms, Leopold and Molly. Though most critics have focussed only on ‘Poldy’, Molly is fundamental to the work, of which more below.

And, like the novel, Blooms’ Day (not Bloom’s Day) parties celebrate the epic wanderings of ordinary men and women.

Today the Jewish Dublin man, Leopold Bloom, is once again leaving his house on Eccles Street without his key. He is looking forward to his breakfast, communing with his cat, bringing his sleeping wife a cup of tea, patting his pocket, finding it empty, and deciding—in a small heroism of the overlooked—to leave now anyway, rather than wake her.

But it’s a book in which plot—what people do—is less important than the meaning they attribute to doings. For me, this towering masterpiece of modernism which encompasses so much, and the writing of which so exhausted its author that he didn’t write a line of prose for a year, is, above all, a celebration of the human creative spirit.

Subscribe

We don’t, as a rule, think of Bloom as a creative man. He is an advertising canvasser, selling white space at the margins of other people’s creativity but this is precisely Joyce’s point: that the imaginative life is not the property of poets and prophets but the ordinary motion of a human mind.

Ulysses is a creativist book.

So I’m drawing on its energy today as I set my creative intentions for the next moon cycle.

Shooting for the Moon

The cycle ahead is a very interesting time for me as I kick off my ‘shooting for the moon’ plan in my work that I told you about last time. I’m aiming to expand my publishing business tenfold—which means I am travelling in multiple directions at once.

No book understands better what it means to shoot for the moon in all the ways than Ulysses—a whole epic spun from a single day's wandering, errand laid on imagining, thought laid on feeling, philosophy laid on physicality, by a man who travels everywhere only to arrive back home to his wife—a woman whose thoughts and feelings, philosophy and physicality, celebrate passion, and creativity, and the true meaning of life.

And no book demonstrates better how human creativity operates beneath conscious intention.

A man can set out to sell an advertisement and end up attending a funeral, all the while make an epic without once intending to.

Bloom’s day is a working day, and his mind is occupied with challenges around one of his ads. He turns it over in his head with real care, this trifle of trade, the way a poet might worry a sonnet. He never quite lands it.

Most of what he intends never quite lands. Bloom is a maker of schemes and projects that come to nothing. Inventions, improvements, get-rich-quick financial exploits, and grand civic overhauls, a private wireless telegraph to beat the bookies…

Under the name of Henry Flower he conducts a clandestine correspondence with a woman he has never met, inventing a self to be loved by, a parallel life lived entirely in his mind—furtive, absurd, and unbearably human.

We are taught to measure creative intention by its completions, by the thing finished and emerged. Ulysses proposes a gentler accounting: that the intention has its own value whether or not it arrives.

Imaginative Sympathy

Bloom’s real creative power is scarcely named, though it’s what his day exists to unfold. He can feel the plight of other people.

He guides a blind piano-tuner across a street. He frets over Mina Purefoy, three days in labour. He sits at a funeral and lets the dead man in.

In the night-fever episode, Joyce calls Bloom the new womanly man, and means it as the highest praise.

This is the art that matters most, what makes Bloom the hero of this epic. Not the things that take his thoughts—the ad, the letters, the schemes—but his empathy.

In Ulysses, imaginative sympathy is the supreme creative act.

At Paddy Dignam's guneral (‘Hades’), surrounded by the cold, casual conversations of the other mourners who judge and gossip, Bloom looks at the coffin and genuinely ‘lets the dead man in,’ confronts the physical reality of decay, the emotional weight of loss, refusing to shield himself with the detached cynicism of the men around him.

In Barney Kiernan’s pub, (‘Cyclops’), a one-eyed nationalist, The Citizen, sits nursing his grievances and his dog, and he turns on Bloom—the Jew, the outsider, the not-quite-Irishman—with a hatred very old and very precise. The kind that seeks a scapegoat.

The kind that is being fomented all around us, again, in 2026, with Belfast families being escorted out of their homes against a baying crowd, with Iranian reservoirs being bombed so that the thirsty go without, with a single man becoming the world’s first trillionaire in the same season that institutions plead poverty and close down programs and people.

The Citizen is not a museum piece. He is the loudest voice in nearly every room, including our own.

Bloom, who is no hero, flusters and over-explains himself and is mocked for the very cut of his grief, as he answers—haltingly, unfashionably—with the opposite of force. With love.

One decent, absurd, frightened man who insists that the opposite of hatred is the only thing worth making meets force with imagination, and answers scapegoat logic by refusing, altogether, to need a scapegoat himself.

He gets a biscuit tin thrown after him for his trouble.

Home he goes, at the end of his Dublin day, to the awful truth that he spent the entire time not-quite-facing: his wife Molly’s extra-marital affair with Blazes Boylan.

NowJoyce takes the last word away from Bloom, and all his male enemies and cronies, and gives it to the woman in the bed beside him. (‘Penelope’)

Molly Bloom lies awake beside her returned husband, who falls into bed muttering something about eggs, and the book opens out into eight long unpunctuated breaths, 24,000 words of monologue with no full stops to fence them—Molly’s scattered thoughts, her memories of the past, her reflections on her current lover and past love.

Molly is unfaithful, and without illusion, and wholly alive. Earlier in the book (‘Nausicaa’) we saw Bloom pleasure himself to the sight of the young Gerty MacDowell in the distance and in another episode (‘Lystregonians’), he reminisces about his first passionate encounter on Howth Head, a Dublin beauty spot,with Molly, and she recalls the same experience now, from her perspective, as her mind keeps tidal-turning back to that morning in Howth, when she passed seed-cake warm from her own mouth to Bloom’s, and got him to propose to her and she said yes.

The Sun Shines for You

Molly is all creative impulse and she rejects the mechanistic world view of atheists and men of learning:

why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth Head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all of a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is

The whole vast machinery of the day—the funeral, the pub, the hatred, the grief—resolves into a woman remembering desire and choosing it again.

Yes to the body. Yes to the man. Yes to having been wanted, and to wanting.

Molly’s yes is the final answer to the Citizen’s no, delivered not as argument but as generative appetite for sex, for memory, for the green hill and the mountain flowers and the warm mouth.

The book that began with a man’s forgotten key ends on a woman throwing the door wide.

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

In a 1921 letter, Joyce described Yes as ‘the female word,’ indicating ‘acquiescence, self-abandon, relaxation, the end of all resistance.’

Saying yes is the core conditions for creative flow, for love.

Earlier that afternoon, Molly slept with Blazes Boylan but as she drifts off to sleep, her mind abandons him to return to the foundational love of her life with her husband.

The hope at the end of the novel is that the Blooms might return to their earlier love and enjoy intimacy together again. The creative reality is, probably not.

Still, ‘Yes’ is always the answer.

Intentions: Attention not Achievment

Bloomsday teaches that a creative intention does its real work in the living of it, not the landing, and if most of my creative intentions this month come to nothing—as Bloom’s tramline for the cattle came to nothing—Ulysses has already absolved me.

While I plan and aim and shoot for the moon, the reaching is actually the work. A life is the sum of all its attentions, not just its achievements.

So I set these creative intentions down lightly, while meaning them wholly (and knowing it’s A LOT).

Under the Strawberry moon 2026 I will:

MAKER

• finish the redesign of my poetry gift books with my daughter, Ornagh

• write and publish eight more chapters of my next novel here on Substack

• Release Act 1 of A Life Before as an epub

MANAGER

• hire a publishing assistant and a GEO marketing service

• find a new office space

• complete the Maud Gonne Society website transfer, setting up transactions and our next online meeting

MARKETEER

• Get working Shanaya and Claude and the new marketing service on GEO and Amazon ads

• Draw together a beta-reading group for the serial

And my ‘Top Thing’ (see my note on this here)

• create ten deep and powerful connections between my author website and my Substack.

What about you? What’s the most empowering thing you could do for yourself this month? What’s your ‘Top Thing’ right now? I’d dearly love to hear what you’re up to.

Now, I’m off to our St Leonards Bloomsday event organised by the wonderful Lucy Brennan. No doubt, dressing up and delving down will happen, as the book and its feast day again ask us to walk out into the hatred of our own hour and answer it like the Blooms did.

With the two words hidden in every creative intention.

Love. And Yes.

Happy Bloomsday!

Subscribe

Share

Join the chat

Tell us about your own creative intentions (or relationship with Bloomsday / Ulysses / Joyce) in the comments.

A LIFE BEFORE: The Story So Far. 20-year-old Maud Gonne has put aside her ambition to be an actress to instead embark on a life of adventure as mistress and political ally to the married Boulangist politician, Lucien Millevoye. She has come to Constantinople to support his to work to see General George Boulanger installed as a populist dictator in France. In return, he is will help her in her wish to oppose the British Empire in Ireland. Meanwhile, the young W.B. Yeats, is about to move with his family to London, leaving his muse, Laura Armstrong behind.

• Scroll down to read on.

• Begin at the beginning here.

• Or find your place any time with The Story Index

A Life Before is a literary-historical novel, based on the true life story of the English heiress turned Irish revolutionary, Maud Gonne, and the poet she inspired, W.B. Yeats. A story of passion, intrigue, and spiritual ambition set in 1880s Ireland, England and France, it is narrated by Rosy Cross, ‘the oldest woman in Ireland’. Each episode forms a standalone short story that, taken together, build to a whole.

Don’t miss out! Subscribe to receive each episode in the Substack App and a round-up email once a month

Previous <— | Story Index

The SS Saghalien pulls into Naples at three o’clock precisely and and there's Maud Gonne already at the rail, first to the gangway as she's first to most things. It’s December and sunny, two conditions Naples sees no quarrel in holding at the one time. Down at the harbour, the boys are diving for coins. A passenger behind her flicks a soldo from the ship rail and away they all go, diving off the wall down into the green like gannets, to break the surface a minute later spluttering and shouting up into the winter light, the coin clamped in the winner's grinning teeth.

Coin from above, scrabble below, the whole arrangement of the world in the one splash, if you've an eye for it—but Maud has hers set on the shore beyond, and the life waiting there for her. She puts up at the Grand Hôtel on the seafront, where the ceilings are high, the bed wide and deep, and the windows give onto the bay. After her weeks at sea she's grateful past telling for a room that stays put. Her body still holds the rocking of the ship and she knows she’ll wake in the night, swaying in a sea no longer there.

Just two more cities now, and one last boat, between herself and freedom: first Paris and Millevoye, then London and Uncle William, and then—once the birthday's come and gone, the lawyers heard, the papers signed, and the last of her elders has talked themselves out—her own life in her own two hands. After waiting so long, this last stretch is the hardest to bear.

But for now: tea. The English have brought their afternoon tea-hour south with them, the way they bring everything, and here in the hotel it’s taken at four o’clock, in the great glassed terrace above the bay. Down she goes, to white cloths starched enough to stand up on their own and tiered arrangements of deliciousness: bread and butter at the base, cut to fingers, with egg, cucumber or potted meat; Madeira and seed cakes above, dense and golden and still warm, breathing out their faint scent of caraway; and crowning the lot, almond-sweet macaroons, silken-crisp on top and chewy-soft beneath. Add small oranges from the kitchen garden, a jug of cream, honey that falls slow off the spoon, and a bowl of figs, split to show the red seeded hearts of them—and a girl might forget she'd a hunger for anything more.

Mid-fig, a waiter brings a telegram:

It is so, so like Millevoye to spend who knows how many francs on those extra words: No other hand will serve. Oh the dear man, what has he lined up for her? She has just spent the better part of a month in the East and hopes he does not intend a return to Constantinople. Lila was a sweet creature, and play-acting at Turkish princesses and the telling of fortunes with her had been pleasant enough, but she is another girl who is just marking time between her coming out ball and her wedding parade. Though she had lived in the city for many months she cheerfully confessed to being as ignorant of Constantinople ways as the day she arrived.

‘They live differently to us,’ was the whole of what she'd say, whenever Maud Gonne remarked on a veiled woman, or the muezzin's call unspooling over the rooftops at dusk, or what went on behind the lattice-screened windows where the people lived. Only one Ottoman custom held interest for her: the harem. She’d loved hearing all about how, on the boat over, Maud Gonne had got herself in to visit ladies kept behind a great canvas awning on deck by an old Turk with a grey beard.

She'd won her entry by her marmoset. Chaperone, she'd named the little creature, her proud joke at being a girl not yet one-and-twenty whose minder was a monkey on a chain. She'd had a stewardess carry word of it to the Turkish ladies and the bait took. Back came her invitation to the secret sanctum. The awning was lifted by the master of the household himself; but, though his number one, two and three ‘favourites’ were all of the party, the visit proved dull. Bar the ladies' raptures over the marmoset, the talk was strictly conventional, and conducted near entirely by the old Turk himself.

Lila said she and her mother had been received a few times by the ladies of one or two of the great harems of the city, and had come away the same: knowing no more coming out than going in. The ignorance didn’t trouble her much. She’d lately got herself engaged to a young Scandinavian in the Embassy and was as happy as a wren in a whin bush. Nothing signified now but her Carl, her ring, her wedding—and, until Maud Gonne put a firm stop to it, trawling the young secretaries for a similar catch for her friend. Said friend made it plain she'd no interest in the haul.

‘You are such a strange girl,’ Lila said, with a fond little shake of her head. ‘But you forget I know how you like to flirt, as much as any of us.’

‘Ah flirtation. Certainly. Flirtation costs a woman nothing.’

‘Have you truly never encouraged a proposal?’

‘Once only,’ Maud Gonne said. ‘It was disastrous. I promised Tommy I would never do it again.’

‘Who was it? Did you not care for him?’

‘An Italian of the streets. Not a jot.’

‘Have you never cared for anyone?’

Part of her ached to tell her friend the whole of it, every last thing about Millevoye. It pulled sore at her that she could not. Until now the two of them had shared every thought and feeling, all their young dreams and shames and fears, but Boulangism was spreading, and Millevoye's name was getting itself known, even beyond France. His marriage might be a sham, but it was a sham he had to keep up—as a Catholic, as a politician, as a father. Now, picturing the recoil on Lila's sweet face, Maud Gonne understood that she would have to be his secret’s keeper too, that it would sort her future, dividing the world into those she could let near and those who must be kept at the glass. And Lila — dear Lila — was already on the far side of it.

The greatest fact of Maud Gonne’s life would sit at the table between the two of them, and never be named. There was a loneliness in that she was only beginning to learn. She would only ever be able to own the affair to the few who'd understand—or the fewer still, like Kathleen, who couldn't understand it at all but would never hold their puzzlement against her.

No matter. As Tommy’s daughter, she knew all about locked drawers, and letters not to be asked after, and a second self folded small and put away. That was the making of a grown woman, perhaps? Or at least a woman of the kind she wanted to be. ‘Oh that proposal,’ she shuddered, with a dramatic roll of her eyes. ‘But for myself, I blame Rome. The city should not be so romantic.’

Lila, diverted as intended, laughed and asked to know more.

Bar from the official teas and dinners, the two of them were kept well under wraps in the Embassy, and could go nowhere without their Kavasses—the ceremonial guards the Sultan granted to ambassadors and consuls and their like. Great big bodyguards in gold braid and scarlet sashes, whose whole employment was to stride out ahead of their charges, swinging a long staff to clear the common people off the footpath at the grand foreigners' approach. The people would naturally scowl at being so shoved aside and Maud Gonne hated every step taken in the wake of that staff. She’d seen similar on Irish roads, performed by a red coat.

‘Can’t we go out without the Kavass?’ she asked Lila.

‘Oh no! Father would never allow it—and rightly. We would not be safe.’

Maud Gonne, unpersuaded, put the same question to Sir William himself at dinner.

‘It is the custom,’ said the Ambassador. ‘Foreigners are not liked here.’

‘Well little wonder, Sir William, if that’s the manner we go among them.’

He let that sail past as though he hadn’t heard it, a diplomat’s first lesson.

It was all very vexing. Millevoye had sent her out here with high hopes of what a clever girl might gather up in an ambassador’s house, but Sir William’s secrets were kept in the office, not left lying about the place like calling-cards. And talk at the diplomatic entertainments ran to nothing but weather and scandal and who was invited where.

Keeping her ears cocked and trying to fill the little notebook she’d brought for revelations started to feel less like the work of a secret agent than like a small girl allowed up past her bedtime. So when Lila suggested they should dress up as Turkish ladies, she gave herself over to play-acting in earnest, figuring she might as well. Using veils and scarves and shawls got up to pass as robes, the pair of them drifted about the jasmine-heavy Embassy gardens, Lila as the Sultan's wife and Maud Gonne his concubine.

She tried to talk Lila into stepping out the gate in their finery, to pay a surprise call on one of her friends—but let them take so much as a step toward the front door and there’d be a Kavass in the hall, leaping to attention. Sir William got wind of the scheme, and met them with a big lecture. If they were taken for Turkish women out walking alone, they’d be breaking the law—and any man at all would have the right to have them seized and jailed.

xxx

All in all, it was a strange class of holiday—neither the rest her aunt had ordered up for her nor the great adventure she’d hoped for herself. The highlight of the visit was a scrying. When they were small, she, Lila and Kathleen had got up to all manner of occult experiments—Kathleen round-eyed and fearful, sometimes joining in, sometimes hid behind a book or under a blanket. They’d tried the lot: reading tea-leaves, laying playing-cards out in crosses, table-turning, and their favourite, the letter-board. The planchette skating its little heart-shaped self across the alphabet gave them a small cold thrill every time, each of them feeling the neck-hairs lift as she watched the other’s face for the cheat and found none, the thing moving under their fingers of its own accord.

Once the planchette spelt out a name—MARGUERITE—that none of them knew, but Bowie told them was a great-aunt of Maud Gonne’s, thirty years in her grave. When Lila brought that strange day back to her in Constantinople, the name read different to Maud Gonne, and caught her like a hook. Wasn’t Marguerite the name of General Boulanger’s own mistress—the very woman Millevoye had been so keen for her to meet. Might the board, all those years back, have spelled out not her past but her future? Not the dead aunt at all, but the years still ahead? She could fair hear Millevoye’s answer, were she to ask him. Ma chère, half of France is christened Marguerite—and then that indulgent laugh of his, smoothing the notion away even as it patted her head for having had it.

Another long ago time, out of a hot dead afternoon, they’d raised three slow knocks from inside a wall cupboard. She and Lila sat very still but Kathleen bolted. For years after she wouldn’t sleep without a candle. The cupboard, when opened by Bowie, held nothing at all.

In Constantinople, Lila had taught her what she called tasseomancy, a Turkish cousin of reading the leaves. The thick sweet coffee was drunk down to its silt, then you turned the cup three times and tipped the grains out onto the saucer, and Lila was forever at it, coaxing out meaning. When it came her turn to read for Maud Gonne, though, she could find only mud. She willed the shapes to rise and they sulked. She tilted the cup to the lamp and found nothing in it but the grounds, and Maud Gonne’s wanting eyes on her.

Both of them nettled at the failure, Lila proposed a scrying—glass and candle, the old way, and somewhere she’d not feel rushed nor fear a maid putting her head round the door. A room dark as midnight; a single candle held off to the side; a spell said; and then staring into the glass until the face of the man you were to wed rose up over your shoulder. The two of them would see it together and read it between them.

‘But you know already whom you’re to wed,’ said Maud Gonne.

‘Yes, and I first saw his face in the glass. Now I want to know will we be happy? And how many children to expect, and whether they’ll be boys.’

Lila showed her the glass she used, an old cheval mirror in a box-room off the gallery, tall as a door. They settled on a night when Sir William was to lodge over at the Sultan’s palace, and sat side by side on a warmed seat before the dark pane. Lila went first—shut her eyes, said her spell, and found in the glass the whole of what she'd brought to it: a long contented life, a full nursery, herself dearly beloved. She smiled, well pleased, and turned the candle. ‘Now you.’

The candle guttered, though there was no draught in the room, and Maud Gonne found her two hands gone cold. She kept her eyes open but let them go soft, and breathed the way a woman in Howth had taught her once, when she was a child and very upset over something, and which she always used now for her occult experiments. My Nana taught me the same breath for crossing over: out and out and out you breathe, past the easy end of it, pressing the last of the air from between your ribs, then relaxing and letting the in-breath lift of itself, swelling the lungs with no effort to it. ‘It's the long giving-out that opens the room for the great coming-in,’ Nana would say. ‘The giving-out is yours to labour at. The coming-in is the gift that gives itself, and gives the more the emptier it finds you.’

Three times Maud Gonne pushed out that deepening breath, till her head was light as a blown egg and the room around them had loosened its grip. Then she put it to the glass in her mind—show me what I'm to be—trying, as she did, not to influence it, to keep from her imaginings of the lit stage and the hushed house, and the applause at curtain's fall, her name on the bills from Paris to New York. Nor that other stage Millevoye had painted for her of late, speaking as Ireland’s Joan of Arc for real, and a different class of applause entirely. Show me.

What the glass showed her was a woman, yes, but one only a little like herself. Herself and not. Smaller, and darker, and grey all through—grey-gowned, grey-veiled, a sorrow in her grey as the inside of a raincloud. She stood behind, in the very place the bridegroom ought to have stood, and did nothing, said nothing, only looked out with her huge grey eyes.

Lila leaned in, her breath fogging the glass. ‘What are you seeing, Maud? Are you all right?’

The grey lady kept to Maud Gonne’s eye alone then, moment later, the candle guttered out, though it was far from spent. She jumped then laughed a bright, hard laugh. ‘A trick of the dark, I think, Lila. A poor return for our trouble.’

From then on, Maud Gonne’s face was turned for home. The cups went back to holding nothing but coffee. Sir William returned from the Sultan’s to rule that they were to play at Turkish princesses no more—not even within the Embassy walls—for there were whispers abroad that the English Ambassador kept a secret harem of his own. Maud Gonne was furious and it was only on the ship home that she realised why. A man may cheerfully deal with another who keeps a real harem but two girls in borrowed veils are a scandal that wants shutting down.

Before Millevoye had turned her trip into a reconnaissance, she had seen it as an adventurous way to take her fill of girlhood with Lila before her majority came to claim her—but it had taken far less to fill than she’d reckoned. Her girlhood was already gone, had left when she met Millevoye.

Now, back in Naples, she is hungry for him and for home, for work and purpose. She wants to be wanted, and useful, and going somewhere, not standing still to be stared at by a grey and grieving quiet.

Next day, the follow-up letter arrives to her hotel. She sees at once why he’d advised her to trust it: without the warning, she'd have called hoax. It is a summons from Juliette Adam, Mme. Adam, La Grande Française herself, the woman who carries more wit and weight and love of France in her one small person than the whole of the Chambre des Députés laid end to end. Mistress of Paris’s leading political salon; founder and editor of La Nouvelle Revue; equal of the many great men she counts as friends—Gambetta, Flaubert, Hugo, Daudet; and author herself of dearly loved fictions.

In Constantinople, Maud Gonne was left feeling a washed-up amateur with three lines in a copybook, blinking at the grown-ups. Now the grandest grown-up of the lot was sending for her by name.

Boulevard Malesherbes, Paris

Mademoiselle,

You do not know me but our common friend has spoken of you often. Will you come to me in Paris at the above address? I shall be there to receive you at your convenience. Your aunt need not be troubled with the journey.

Bien à vous,

Mme Juliette Adam

She knows this lady once put up the money for a mission of Déroulède’s, to treat with certain Slavic leaders on Boulanger’s behalf. Might the ‘friend in the East Millevoye’s wire had spoken of be one of the Balkan leaders? Only one way to know.

And so, immediately, to Paris.

| Previous Story |<— | Story Index | —> | 2:2 ‘To St Petersburg’ in which Maud Gonne is set to work, coming soon |

A LIFE BEFORE: The Story So Far. 20-year-old Maud Gonne has embarked on a life of adventure as mistress and political ally to the married Boulangist politician, Lucien Millevoye. She has travelled to Constantinople to support his to work to see General George Boulanger installed as a populist dictator in France. In return, he is to help to establish her as an Irish activist, opposing the British Empire. Meanwhile, the young W.B. Yeats, a poet in need of a muse, has been told by his father that the family are to move to London. SCROLL DOWN TO READ ON.

A Life Before is a literary-historical novel, based on the true life story of the English heiress turned Irish revolutionary, Maud Gonne, and the poet she inspired, W.B. Yeats. A story of passion, intrigue, and spiritual ambition set in 1880s Ireland, England and France, it is narrated by Rosy Cross, ‘the oldest woman in Ireland’. Each episode forms a standalone short story that, taken together, build to a whole.

Story 12 is below. Begin at the beginning with Act 1:1: A Strange House of Time or find your place with The Story Index

Previous <— | Story Index

Conversations with W.B. Yeats II: M.M. Chatterjee

The twenty-one year old heart is a thin-walled vessel, with a tendency to crucify itself, and that of poet most of all. Certainly W.B. has himself up now on three different crosses, blaming his nearest and dearest for driving in the nails. Laura, the girl he loves, shows no sign of returning to him from her misbegotten marriage; his father, has ordered that Dublin is to be abandoned for hateful London; and, perhaps the keenest cut, his friend Charlie has quietly hijacked the little hermetic society they founded with friends and bartered it off to the Theosophists. And now has sent this apology to polish up the spear after use.

WB composes twenty replies in his head and writes out three in fact, only to tear them up. A poor use of precious ink and paper. Trouble is, he has to go. For the man Johnston is bringing to Dublin is no ordinary chela but the brightest jewel in Madame Blavatsky's Indian crown. it is the most exciting thing to have happened in occult Dublin circles…ever. Chatterjee is said to speak seven languages and to write excellent poetry in at least two. He is supposedly translating the Bhagavad Gita into an English so musical it makes the original weep with envy and receives whispered communications from the Mahatmas themselves.

Curiosity is the master of any creative young man—it eats pride for its tea. In the end he returns five lines.

The room they've taken is above a printer's off Dawson Street, up a narrow stair that smells of ink and damp wool. A girl on the landing takes the threepence and writes his name in a ledger with a pen that splutters. He goes up, and is relieved that Johnston is nowhere in sight

In the room, the The audience sit on bentwood chairs with their hats in their laps. The shutters are closed, with candles set in clusters of three about the room, and the walls above carrying pinned-up Theosophist symbols on cards: the looped serpent, the interlaced triangles, the eye in the triangle’s heart.

Above a curtained alcove at the front of the room, a portrait of Madame Blavatsky has been clipped from a magazine and mounted on board, and some wag or worshipper has pencilled a halo onto the wall above her head. Lute-like strains reach his ears as he walks up to the second row, to takes his seat between his friends Russell and Gregg. Miss Joyce is on the small platform with a long-necked instrument across her lap, plucking out a thin Eastern tune with a wire pick. Her head bends over the strings as though she is hearing the notes for the first time and they are a surprise to her.

Russell and Gregg greet him with little attention as he sits between them, then resume the argument they were having, talking across him as though the chair were still empty. He does not engage. He does not, just now, trust himself to use the word ‘soul’ without a tremor. The tune, in time, comes to its close and Miss Joyce inclines her head to a polite patter of applause.

From the back of the room, Charles Johnston’s voice, loud as though megaphoned, booms out: ‘Ladies and gentlemen! Mr Mohini M. Chatterjee!’

In he comes, with Johnston following behind. A small man, dark-skinned, wearing a dark European overcoat slung loose over his shoulders, and beneath it loose white robes that fall to his ankles. At the stage, he does not approach the lectern, just hands over his coat to Johnston, then lowers himself, in a single slow and graceful fold, into a cross-legged pose on a cushion already placed for him with his palms together to prayer position at his chest.

He bows his head once, slowly, and then lifts, turning his eyes—gentle, velvet-dark, eyes—on them. He seems to be composed of nothing but stillness. The room hushes itself. A whole ceremony has been made out of arriving without ceremony.

When silence has settled, he touches his thumbs to forehead, lips, sternum. ‘Namaskar,’ he says, the traditional Indian greeting. And he begins.

He speaks, in careful, accented English of the ignorance of the West concerning the wisdom of the East, and of why he has crossed the world to mend it. He names Kalidasa, who wrote his great verses while Rome was being broken open by barbarians at the gate. He tells of the atman, the eternal essence within each person, and of Brahman, the great soul of which the small soul is one droplet.

The small soul and the great soul are not two things, he says, but one thing seen from two sides of a thin veil. What we call the world is illusion—the rope mistaken for a snake, the tree-trunk taken in dim light for a man. You leap, then you look, then you laugh. Reality is what is left when the laugh has cleared the air. Reality—pure, perfect and complete.

W.B., in the second row, listens with his whole self pitched forward, long and thin, like a sapling curved by a fresh wind as the Indian gestures his little gestures with delicate hands, rendering all things silent and gentle with his enchanting power.

W.B. thinks: Madame Blavatsky is indeed fortunate in her chela. He thinks: Chaterjee is beautiful as only an Indian is beautiful. He thinks: to sit thus is as it must have been to sit before Jesus Christ on a Galilean hillside. He thinks: I was right to come. My pride would have kept me from this. My pride is a fool.

The oratory he and the other boys of the Hermetic Society have been practising, their earnest debates, their ‘let us now consider’ and ‘it is evident’ flourishes of speech, are also hereby exposed.

He cannot wait to speak to Chatterjee alone.

The lecture ends. The chairs scrape and the skirts swish and the room exhales like a church released from prayer. Chatterjee is whisked off through a side door for a break, and W.B., who is to have the first private audience, takes himself out to the small lobby and sits on a hard chair against the wall, his hands flat on his thighs, the cool fire from the lecture still shining in him.

He tries to ignore the cross-breeze of gossip being exchanged by a little group standing over him. A woman with a brisk, knowing mouth—a Miss Browne, he ascertains—has a story of Chaterjee having been instructed by Madame to prostrate himself on the ground before Madame Blavatsky in Charing Cross Station, before the commuters and porters and pigeons, and the press invited.

‘Oh no,’ another voice puts in. ‘That’s simply not true. Madame objected to his display, insisted he rise.’

‘Well, yes.’ Miss Browne’s eyebrow performs a small pirouette. ‘But was the objection real? Or part of the play?’

And then of course they are off — onto the Society for Psychical Research and its damning report into Madame’s activities. They have deemed her repertoire of occult tricks—flowers mysteriously falling from ceilings, letters inexplicably arriving by astral mail with messages from the Mahatmas, astral bells, music, moving bodies and more—to be ‘wholly fraudulent’ and concluded that she deserves permanent remembrance ‘as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters of history.’

Everyone with an interest in Theosophy or the occult has an opinion and the voices in the lobby around W.B. take it up again now, like a song to which everyone half-knows the words.

W.B. does not accept the fraud theory, it is wholly unable to cover the facts. Madame Blavatsky’s work has drawn good minds, including his own, into study. Disciplined them into symbol and ritual, and made them feel the world widen beyond the parish of common sense. He does not need her to be a saint. He needs her to be a question mark, a note of interrogation, a living provocation.

Someone says: ‘What do you think the brahmin is thinking about when he stares off, into the middle distance?’

‘I’d say his dinner,’ Miss Brown says, and all laugh.

‘Is it true that he lives on a only a plate of rice and an apple a day?’

‘Such discipline!’

‘Apparently not so with other calls of the flesh.’

There's a lady in France, it seems. And another lady in London. Does Madame know, does Madame mind, does anyone really know any of it at all, or is it only gossip? On they go. W.B. now has his eyes closed, trying to shut out their talk. He hates it all, the whispers, the slyness, the insinuation. He feels more loyalty to Madame than some of those who call themselves her acolytes but doubt—his old friend, his old enemy—slips its hand into his coat. What if it’s true, and Chatterjee is all performance? What if the rope is actually a snake?

These ancient scriptures of India, the Upanishads and Vedas: are they not, like those of Christianity and Judaism, but cries of the mind’s belief? And those Mahatmas of Madame, Morya, Koot Hoomi: are they actually living presences on some finer plane, or names pinned on a disciple’s need to believe?

Whenever he begins to tremble at his own vision, he calls up Blake. ‘If the Sun and Moon should doubt, they would immediately go out,’ he recites now in his mind, to himself. The flame steadies.

The door opens. Miss Collins appears—brisk, efficient, not at all mystical in manner—and calls him, as if for a fitting: ‘Mr Yeats.’

Chatterjee sits at a square table, watching him come in with a look like a cool hand laid flat on a feverish forehead. He motions him to sit, staring all the while with a scrutiny too intense. W.B. can feel his own eyes skittering everywhere, over the table that carries the ring-marks of a great many cups, over Chatterjee’s overcoat hung on the back of his chair, over the inside pocket with the top of the book showing. Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, which W.B. knows by the cloth alone, having lived inside it more than once.

‘Thank you for visiting us, Mr Chatterjee,’ W.B. begins, formal as a schoolboy under instruction. ‘I have found much to admire in your teachings.’

‘But you have questions,’ Chatterjee says.

W.B. blinks.

‘And doubts?’ Chatterjee leans forward, dark eyes steady. It seems to be not a look gathering what it can to use against you but one which says: I note you. You may stop making your mask now.

W.B. hears words he has never shared walking out his mouth, of their own accord, about his father insisting on the family’s return to London, the city where he was once bullied and reduced.

‘Is it certain to be the disaster you fear?’ Chatterjee asks. ‘You are no schoolboy now.’

‘My friends are here.’ W.B. hesitates, and the next thing is too large for his throat. ‘And—unless…’

‘Unless?’

‘There is a lady. If I cannot stay in Dublin, she cannot return to me. She will not know how to find me.’

‘Where is she now?’

Even Chatterjee’s eyes can’t extract these walk out of him: Somewhere in suburbia with her husband. ‘There is an impediment to our association.’

‘Ah. Then might it not be best to let her go and find yourself a more … available lady?’

‘No, it is not possible. She is my destiny. If I abandon my devotion to her, I abandon my writing.’

There’s the peg and all the coats hanging on it. A fine peg, but overloaded.

‘I’m afraid I do not understand. Tell me more.’

Hafiz’s cry to his beloved comes ringing into his mind, and he says it aloud to the brahmin, but altering the colour of the beloved’s hair to Laura’s: ‘I made a bargain with that red hair before the beginning of time, and it shall not be broken.’

‘But is it the lady herself to whom you have devoted yourself, or the posture you take before her?’

W.B. blinks again. ‘I do not separate these.’

‘Then perhaps do,’ Chatterjee says, gently, as a father unhooks a child’s fingers from a dangerous toy. ‘Ask yourself whether the poem comes because she is she—or because you become, in her presence, the man who reveres. A posture can be taken toward a woman who symbolises life, or it can be taken toward life itself.’

W.B. gives a dry little laugh—his courage showing its teeth. ‘So I should make a vow to the air and call it devotion.’

‘Avow the power of your own attention,’ Chatterjee replies. ‘Reverence lights the lamp in you. Now let it light for many things.’

At that moment Miss Joyce slips in with the tea—shy, careful, holding the tray as if it might shame her by rattling. Chatterjee rises and thanks her with such grace that the cracked cups seem, for a second, like fine china. He the ordinary noble.

W.B. stares at the steam as if it might carry messages.

‘And London?’ he asks at last. ‘Must I go like a condemned man?’

‘Go like a pilgrim,’ Chatterjee says. ‘The Liffey and the Thames are cousins. Each can teach you what it knows.’

W.B. sits very still. His doubt, which had held him rigid, begins to loosen. He thinks, unwillingly, of his mother by the fire. Of Lolly and Lily making do. Of the thinness in the house that is not only hunger but dread. He speaks it out at last, ashamed. ‘Sometimes I feel weather in my skull that alarms me. Madness runs in certain of my people.’

‘Fear is a hungry ghost,’ Chatterjee says. ‘Do not feed it with prophecy. What appears substantial is often most shadowy. What appears shadowy may hold the greater substance.’

W.B. doesn’t understand but it hardly matters. The words are reaching into his soul xxxx (Rosy)

‘Suppress all desire,’ Chatterjee says, ‘even the desire for emancipation.’

‘For immortality?’

‘Yes, most of all the desire for immortality. Only by laying down the desire, the attachment, can you enter that or any exalted state. Immortality itself is free of all desire.’

Then he gives him a story, as Eastern teachers always do. You cannot argue with a story.

‘A father named Uddalaka Aruni, seeking to show his son the truth of the universe, gave him a lump of salt. “My son,” Uddalaka said, “go and place this lump of salt into a vessel of water. Come back to me when the sun greets us tomorrow morning.” The boy did as he was told. When the morning mist cleared, the father said, “Bring me that salt you placed in the water.” Svetaketu looked into the jar, but his eyes found nothing. The salt had vanished.

“I cannot find it, Father,” the boy replied.

The father smiled softly. “Sip from the surface. How does it taste?”

“It is salty, Father.”

“Throw some away and sip from the middle. What now?“

“It is salty, Father.”

“Now, throw away almost all and sip from the very bottom. What do you find?”

“Still salty.”

“So hand me the salt?”

“I cannot.”

Uddalaka then said, “Just as you cannot see the salt, yet it permeates every drop of that water, so too does the Supreme Self—the Atman—pervade all of existence.” Then, he spoke the words that echo from his time to ours: “Tat Tvam Asi.”’

‘What does it mean?’

‘The words mean, “That art thou.” Uddalaka’s message for his son was that he was that essence that exists through all the forms. So too with that which you feel for your lady…’

‘Miss Armstrong,’ W.B. says. ‘Laura.’

‘That which you feel for Miss Laura Armstrong will change forms, but it will never vanish. Everything that has been will be.’

W.B. swallows. The words have gone straight to the sore place. they eyes and the wrods and the voice of the brahmin have turned the world lucid and tender. He does not have to be perfect; he has only to be human, and he has already been human in many forms, across great rolling waters of time. The grip of his jaw loosens. The clench in his gut softens. He has not had this much room inside himself in months. He is saying a quiet, full ‘yes’ within, with the same joyful languor he has felt in the past when casting spells to Frigga at Howth Head, or when listening to Sligo peasants tell their faery tales, their Gaelic words dropped into the story like charms.

‘Yes?’ asks Chatterjee. ‘Yes, you begin to understand. So now, each night, before you sleep, recite the following: “I have been a king. I have been a slave. There is nothing—fool, rascal, knave—that I have not been. Upon my breast a myriad heads have lain.” Yes?’

W.B. nods. His lips are murmuring the mantra, that scolding creature, his mind is further calmed.

Chatterjee continues, in his sonorous, quoting voice. ‘As things were so shall things ever be. Consider life, not as the means to some end but, from dying hour to dying hour, as an end in itself.’

As if to underline the thought, the clock in the hall strikes—but it also breaks the spell. The two men slip out of their trance. Chatterjee rises and W.B. too and there’s that ungainly moment when men who have been speaking of the soul must decide what to do with their hands.

W.B. thanks him, with fervour, knowing he will never forget this conversation. If Laura is held fast by other people’s promises, he will henceforth be held fast now by his own. He must forsake argument and will, so he can know all sorrow and delight. Now he is all impatience, like a man with a fire in his pocket. He wants his little desk, his pen, the scratch of nib on paper. A poem is waiting there, he needs to catch it.

And so it happens. He walks up Rathmines Road with his coat unbuttoned and his hands forgotten, reciting all the way, and when he gets home, he pauses at the door of the front room, where the girls are at their needlework, and his mother silent by the fire, and his father talking gaily for any ear that will listen, but goes past without even putting his head in to say goodnight—something he has never done before.

Upstairs in his room, he sits at the table and lights the candle and writes the poem, ‘Kanva on Himself’—a dutiful, derivative thing he’ll later drop from his collected works, but the meaning of life it holds, as imparted by the brahmin, is something he never renounces. It goes on working and proving in him, like yeast, so that forty years from tonight, when he’s spent a lifetime making poems and death has become a near neighbour, he will return to this understanding, but now with the skill to meet it in rhyme.

With the gratitude of a lifetime, he will explain how it aerated his entire life’s work and will name it plain: ‘Mohini Chatterjee’. But for now, ‘Kanva on Himself.’

Kanva on Himself

By W.B. Yeats

I.

Now wherefore hast thou tears innumerous?

Hast thou not known all sorrow and delight

Wandering of yore in forests rumorous,

Beneath the flaming eyeballs of the night.

II.

And as a slave been wakeful in the halls

Of Rajas and Mahrajas beyond number?

Hast thou not ruled among the gilded walls?

Hast thou not known a Raja’s dreamless slumber?

III.

Hast thou not sat of yore upon the knees

Of myriads of beloveds, and on thine

Have not a myriad swayed below strange trees

In other lives? Hast thou not quaffed old wine

IV.

By tables that were fallen into dust

Ere yonder palm commenced his thousand years?

Is not thy body but the garnered rust

Of ancient passions and of ancient fears?

V.

Then wherefore fear the usury of Time,

Or Death that cometh with the next life-key?

Nay, rise and flatter her with golden rhyme,

For as things were so shall things ever be.

* * *

| Previous Story |<— | Story Index | —> | ACT TWO coming soon.

“Not lost exactly. More like set aside. Left in a closet somewhere. In the pocket of a pair of pants that no longer fit. Ina shoebox on the top shelf with old drawings and notebooks full of half-sketched ideas. Somewhere. Wherever it was, it sat there while I kept wondering whether it was worth going back for.

“Then I got cancer. Then it got worse. Then I thought I was going to die. But I didn’t.
After that, I promised myself I was going to take my voice down off the shelf and see if it still worked. See if it…

Read more

A LIFE BEFORE: The Story So Far. 20-year-old Maud Gonne has embarked on a life of adventure as mistress and political ally to the married Boulangist politician, Lucien Millevoye. She has travelled to Constantinople to support his to work to see General George Boulanger installed as a populist dictator in France. In return, he is to help to establish her as an Irish activist, opposing the British Empire. Meanwhile, the young W.B. Yeats, a poet in need of a muse, has been told by his father that the family are to move to London.

• Scroll down to read on.

• Begin at the beginning here.

• Or find your place with The Story Index

A Life Before is a literary-historical novel, based on the true life story of the English heiress turned Irish revolutionary, Maud Gonne, and the poet she inspired, W.B. Yeats. A story of passion, intrigue, and spiritual ambition set in 1880s Ireland, England and France, it is narrated by Rosy Cross, ‘the oldest woman in Ireland’. Each episode forms a standalone short story that, taken together, build to a whole.

Don’t miss out! Subscribe to receive each episode in the Substack App and a round-up email once a month.

Previous <— | Story Index

Ever since her gun forced his about-turn, the Greek has been making grumbling speeches in his broken English, addressed to nobody in particular— how the lady mistook him entirely, how grievous this injustice, how it is a sad day when a man cannot offer a kindness without offence being taken. Maud Gonne lets him talk. His talk costs her nothing and as their boat draws within sight and hearing of the other crafts plying about the ship, she lowers the revolver back into her handbag. The threat of three hostile boatmen having their wicked way with her has drained away.

The long black barge of the coalers is pulling away from the steamer, job complete. Where earlier the water swarmed with boats, now only stragglers remain—a fat little Turkish lighter low in the water with a cargo of unsold carpets, an old fellow asleep over his oars, with his wares gone soft in the heat. Her erstwhile kidnappers pull up beside the great iron flank of the ship, where the ladder swings ready. She tosses the Greek his fifty francs—resenting him and the harm he meant her but afraid of what fuss he might make if withheld—and waves a steward to the business of the parcels: getting the cigarettes, the flowers, the pots of jam, the whole foolish bright harvest of her stolen afternoon, handed up.

Then there’s just herself. As she is comes up the rungs, the Corsican second officer appears at the rail above her. ‘The Captain knows you went ashore,’ he says. He reaches down a hand, and she takes it, though he is taking her adventure personally, as though she has cost him in the eyes of his superior. 'He knows that you have almost missed the boat. He is very angry.'

Maud Gonne smiles and says something proper, tucking her hands, which have begun to shake, into the folds of her skirt. She had held the gun so steady, and the ladder ropes too as she climbed, but now that nothing is needed of them, shock is unstringing her palms and fingers, making two useless creatures of her hands. She nods, non-committal, and walks with her customary dignity to her cabin, ahead of the steward and her parcels.

At dinner, the captain is indeed very cold and severe. The first-class saloon, with its long white captain’s table, is a warm, close place at any time, a little wooden fiddle-rail running round its edge, to keep the glasses from sliding off into laps. He addresses her in a voice pitched for the other passengers to hear/ It has taken only a few evenings at sea for the dinner table to become its own small parish, with regulars and rituals: who sits above the salt and who below, who greets and is greeted and who merely endures. The captain sounds the same three notes any man who has ever disciplined a younger person in front of a crowd has to play.

Maud Gonne lets him play them, lowering her eyes when lowering serves, lifting them when lifting will do more. The oil lamps swing very gently on their gimbals, so that the light slides back and forth over the silver, and every now and then it’s noticeable that the room leans slightly, diners and decanters both, but just as you notice, it begins to right itself. Nobody remarks on it, for they’ve all got their sea-manners by now.

Once the captain pauses for breath, Maud Gonne draws out all her charm, every trick of flattery and self-effacement she learned at her father’s table and she too plays to the gallery of diners, explaining how she had been seized by such a terrible homesickness for dry land that it overcame her. How she could not expect a man such as himself—a sailor so seasoned, so at home on rough seas—to understand the particular weakness of a one on her first voyage. She has been young and foolish but she is quite alone. Please to forgive her.

He does, of course. A middle-aged man rarely stays angry for long at a beautiful young woman who’s handing him a softener. He agrees she is very young and perhaps did not understand but now that she does—he casts a commanding look around the table—now she does, he must insist that she does not try the like at Smyrna, the next call, where they will lie longer.

She lowers her eyes as assent, hoping that’s the end of it, but he means her to feel more. None of these ports are safe for young women alone. If she ever lands anywhere, it must only be with a proper escort.

Telling Maud Gonne what to do in that didactic voice is the surefire way to launch her in the opposite direction. The part of her that Aunt Mary drilled counsels silence but the words are out before that sense can clap a hand over them. ‘Do you ever consider, Captain, that there is a wrong in women being shut indoors because men are not to be trusted?’

A small stir runs the length of the table. The captain’s sunburnt face turns stringent. ‘It is the way of the world, alas.’

‘But don’t you think the world should change its ways? Surely it is the men with ugly intentions who should be kept off the streets and ports, not good women who only want to feel soil under their feet and do a little harmless shopping?’

The old Turk has developed an intense interest in his water glass. The Russian princess flaps her fan, excitedly. The Levantine merchant who has hardly said a word all voyage shows the first smile anyone has seen, though his wife is quick to amend it.

‘Perhaps, Miss Gonne, in some better century to come, we shall arrange the world along the lines you describe.’ The Captain sends a glance to his audience, inviting amusement at the young lady’s naivety. ‘But this is not that century, Smyrna is not that port, and I am not the man to allow such dangers on my watch.'

She is supposed to take this closing line handed her by the leading man and let that be that. She knows this manner of treatment entirely. The Irish Generals had a version of it. Tommy had his own. Yes, she knows it but a cold fury has come up out of nowhere to get the better of her. ‘Yet surely we need good men such as yourself, Captain, to take right action if such change is ever to happen?’

‘My dear,’ he says, properly offended now. ‘When you are captain of your own ship you may make whatever world you please upon it. Aboard mine, the rule is that ladies do not go ashore alone in ports where ladies are not safe. We may regret the necessity, or indeed’—a smile here for the English clergyman—’we may not. Regardless, we do not dispense with it.’

He turns himself a quarter-degree away from her, towards the merchant, and asks after the wine. Maud Gonne lifts her own glass to her lips, hands steady, and gives the table no more to see.

After dinner she shakes off the Corsican, sees the little nun safe from the deck to her cabin, and then makes a straight line for her own. All she wants now is the one country she can be sure of: her own company, behind a shut door.

She’s barely in when her body begins to declare itself. The shaking starts up in her hands again, only this time it brings the companion of a hot tightness drawn across her chest, high and tight under the breastbone. She cannot tell which of two things is the cause. Is it the plain animal fear that had her pointing a gun across a boat this afternoon, only now released? Or is it the fury that had lain low under her composure all evening, all through the turning of the boat and the Corsican’s scolding at the ladder-head and the long humiliation of the soup. Regardless we do not dispense with it.

She sits on the edge of the bunk. Stands. Sits again. She is having flashbacks: the looks that had travelled between the Greek at his two men; one of them spitting sideways into the water. The waistcoat button at which she had pointed the revolver and held it pointed. Third one down, mother-of-pearl going a little yellow at the edge. She could pick it out now in a line of a hundred buttons.

She tries to take Chaperone onto her lap but her hands cannot quite manage the small precise work of stroking the little creature. The fingers will not gentle themselves, they fumble at the fur. The marmoset makes a fretful sound and she lets her go and feels her own desolation. Whatever it is, fear or fury, it’s too hot for any quick easing and too cold for tears.

Tommy is in it, somehow. The Captain has prised her father loose from the place she had been holding him. Not the Tommy she has been mourning these seven months—the brave soldier who travelled the world on his diplomatic errands, who brought her along with him when he could and liked to let the hotels believe they were man and wife, who taught her how to be unafraid and how to go after a thing once she had decided to want it. The other Tommy. The one with the second life folded away behind the first. The one whose love was his command. The one she has to keep nailed down in his coffin if she is to go on adoring him.

And Millevoye is there too. She groans aloud to feel that and now Chaperone climbs across to her of her own accord, and tucks herself in between ear and shoulder. Maud Gonne holds very still so the little rapscallion will stay and, as she does, a great wave of fatigue rolls up over her, like a warm tide. Closing her eyes against all the men of the world, she drops down into sleep.

For a while there is nothing, black dreamless fathoms of nothing. Then, by degrees, a slow surfacing knowledge that she is dreaming edges up. It is night. There is a boat, not the Greek’s, a different kind of small craft, narrow and old and riding too low in the water. Her father is in it and Millevoye, and they are rowing her to safety, only they have their backs to her and she cannot speak. She wants to ask where they are going but her jaw and voice box, sealed shut, strain to no avail.

Her two men row in rhythm, their oars dipping into liquid that should be water but is thicker and darker, closing over each blade and letting go with a small reluctant suck. She would not put her fingers in that liquid for the world. Millevoye looks round and smiles at her—the small private smile he keeps for her alone—and opens his hand, slow, like a magician revealing a card that is the answer to a trick. In his wet palm sits the Greek’s waistcoat button, mother-of-pearl gone yellow at the edge, gleaming

Behind them where there had been only darkness, now there is another boat, and an unknown man rowing it, his face turned from her too. Her dread of this unknown oarsman is worse than anything and she reaches for the revolver which is instantly in her hand. She goes to raise it but it has gone soft, and is folding itself around her grip like wax and clamping her hand. The more she wills her hand and jaw to work, the tighter her fear. The water lifts, the button shines, and the second man begins, very slowly, to turn his head—

She wakes.

The cabin is dark and close and blessedly solid. Her hand touches the wall. For the first time on the whole cursed voyage she is glad of it so near, and of the low painted ceiling only a hand’s reach above. The narrowness that an afternoon ago had seemed a prison cell now she now feel a solid comfort.

She must move—up onto an elbow, feet to the floor. She strikes a match. The little flare stings her eyes and she’s glad of it, and the good, sharp smell of the sulphur, an ordinary thing doing what it is asked. The lamp catches, steadies, throws its amber glow across the cabin—her brushes on the stand, her gloves where she dropped them, the handbag on the floor with its dead metal cargo. That smile, the button, the melting gun, the unknown man… what does it all mean? Who could know?

She consults her timepiece. Five minutes after midnight. The whole of night still ahead with the after-print of the dream burnt into her. That smile. Air. She needs air. She wraps Chaperone inside her coat and makes an unsteady journey back up the companionway.

It is late, the wind is strong, and the deck is empty. The sky has cleared to a hard black, pricked all over with stars, more than she has ever seen at once, hung close above the mastheads, reflected in the water. Sky above and sky below. She steps forward, up to where the ship’s prow cuts through the dark water, scattering the stars. leaving two long curls of white peeling away to either side

She holds the rail, lets the wind catch her hair, watches the white sentences being written and unwritten in water. Ahead, only the star-spangled sky and sea. Sky, sky, sky, sea, sea, and more sea. Somewhere beyond the Mediterranean, the Aegean. Then the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus. She has a monkey. She has a revolver. She has an assignment. And for the first time since Tommy died, good feelings are rising in her like the swell under the keel. The ship presses on, cutting east.

| Previous Story |<— | Story Index | —> | Finale Act 1: W.B. Yeats finds Eastern mysticism with Mohoni Chaterjee |

Welcome to Embers and Ink, my monthly round-up email—a little late this month. I’m just back from Ireland where my brothers and I were preparing my mother’s house for sale.

My mother left us last year and my father nearly thirty years ago, and now we must let go of the ‘home place,’ as the parental home is called in Ireland. It’s not the house I grew up in but the bungalow to which my folks retired in 1977 so it’s been in the family for almost fifty years.

I’m back now, in my own chosen home place of St Leonards on Sea, finding ideas and words swirling like never before.

It’s the first time in my life that I’ve been so completely conscious of one phase ending and another opening. Partly an age thing, I think, one of the beauties of getting older.

I'm about to greatly expand my publishing business. My intention, in the language of entrepreneurs (not my native tongue, but it’s a useful term): to 10-x it. To grow fast, so that this time next year, it will yield ten times what it yields now.

A creative leap like that changes everything. You can’t do things the way you’ve been doing them. New processes have to be created. New people have to be called in.

And I find I want to 10-x not just my publishing but also my writing output, my fitness level, and three relationships that are very dear to me that could each do with me going ten times deeper than I’ve allowed myself before.

Substack of course is part of that. Below you’ll find fiction reaching the end of its first act, poetry stretching old stories past where they usually go, and an author conversation about serialising fiction on Substack.

I’m keen to hear about what you are creating in your own life too (see the ‘Reader Club’ section below where I have three questions to ask you about that).

I’m now putting together the last feature of this Substack, the Go Creative! podcast. New weekly episodes each Sunday will commence in June and in the meantime I’m fixing up old episodes to fit into the stream here on Substack. More on that next time.

In creative terms, we call this ‘the quickening’—the moment an intention, conscious or subconscious, begins to gather and move.

And, as creativists we know that every quickening asks for a clearing first. Something old has to be released before something new can begin the incubation and investigation and other stages of the creative process.

I’ve known all year that something needed to shift and that it would likely happen when we put ‘the home place’ up for sale, that some deep-down part of me was holding onto old shapes formed there.

Walking its rooms for the last time, sorting with my brothers what we wanted to keep and what would go, getting it ready for the market, has closed that chapter.

I’m ready for a new one. Below there’s a poem, ‘The Finishing’, that says the bits I can only say in poetry but here can I say that as I step into this next creative adventure, I’m so glad I’ll be sharing it with you on Substack and that you’ll walk the way with me.

May whatever is quickening in you find its room to move.

FICTION

This month marked the end of Act One of the serialisation of A Life Before— my literary-historical novel about Maud Gonne and W.B. Yeats.

We finished with:

• Maud Gonne setting off for Constantinople, with a new chaperone—a little marmoset monkey—and Millevoye’s revolver to accompany in her new life as a Boulangist spy.

• And W.B. meeting Mohoni Chatterjee and finding the Indian philosophy that would shape his work for a lifetime.

Here are instructions for reading serialised fiction on Substack and a bit more about this project. Each episode is shaped as a standalone short story so you can just dive in anywhere. Find your place any time using the story index.

READER CLUB

Our next creative salon is on May 31 when we’ll be treated to a rare Blue Moon (the second full moon in a single month). This time, I want to feature some of my paid subscribers—members of my reader club.

• What have you been reading or watching or listening to or working on, that’s really touched you? Do you know why?

• What new forms of creative play or rest have you introduced to your life that others should hear about?

• What are you creating or what do you dearly want to create?

We’ll explore what’s going on for you using a proven creative process that brings joy, peace and clarity. The Go Creative! process.

And I’ll share how I’m going to be using that process to do the 10-xing I spoke of above.

If you’re a paid subscriber and you’d like to feature, just reply to this email with your answers to those questions.

And look forward to seeing the rest of you at the salon. Here’s the link to RSVP and join.

FOR AUTHORS

This month our author focus was all about serialising fiction on Substack. I shared my lessons learned so far and interviewed Simon K Jones, a science fiction and fantasy writer who has been writing serial fiction on Substack for years.

POETRY

I’m now doing a fortnightly poetry reading on Substack in which I choose a poem by another Substack poet I admire and pair it with one of my own on the same theme.

Most recently, it was two poems about the Christian God that stretch essential beliefs about Christianity beyond where the stories usually go: the story of genesis and the story of Easter.

The first was from Pádraig Ó Tuama, an Irish poet who presents the podcast Poetry Unbound with On Being Studios and has published, most recently, an anthology 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (Canongate & WW Norton) and his own collection, Kitchen Hymns (CHEERIO and Copper Canyon).

And below is the poem about endings, beginnings, old homes and new, that I mentioned earlier.

I’ll record a reading of it, with a poem from another Substack poet on the same theme for next time.

The Finishing

I have made a people of my loves.
Holding my parents’ stories, 
told and untold, I have walked
already through so many more lives
than the one they gave me.
This woman I am 
walking Wexford now
is not the girl who set out.

Yet something holds:
a bright thread under all the tearing.
and I follow.

Here is where 
your mother left the world,
a year ago, thirty years after
your father, still held by his flaws.

Here is the Rosslare home 
you must now sell, 
forty years after
they rejected
the old public and private house
where you grew up
in Murrintown.

Here is the convent 
where you were schooled,
and some schoolgirls 
walking Main Street as you walked,
in brown uniform, skirts rolled up.

Here is the hospital hush,
the harbour boats,
the opera-house lights,
the Viking streets,
the Victorian quay,
the unsaid words
still knocking at the heart,
the old fires still smoking fine ash.
So what? So what?
Look back, look back.
But how is the heart to bear
its own ageing,
sitting at the lengthening table
of the missing?

I have tried to keep faith
and keep failing.
Who cares? 
On the worst night,
the moon shut itself out
like a fist. I walked
through the town at dusk,
going through what was wrecked
in me, and knew those bricks
would forget everything
except the road out.

Back home,
my other, chosen home,
I take a walk, grateful
for the consolations of sea and sky. 

A soft wind
comes out of Ireland,
from Murrintown and Rosslare,
over St George’s Channel
and the Celtic Sea,
through Wales and Wiltshire 
and Hampshire and Sussex,
all the way to Hastings 
St Leonards on Sea, 
bearing their dust,
salting my face.

Same coastland low-lying
same flat waves turning,
same high sky.

My new old town:
black net huts
old sea-saints,
funfairs and slot machines,
fat Tuesdays, fish and chips
pilfered by gulls,
sea-bright terraced windows
of makers and dreamers
turned towards tomorrow.

I have no gift to write it yet,
but the next page 
of my walking
is already turning.

Not yet finished, she whispers
pulling the thread. 

A LIFE BEFORE: The Story So Far. 20-year-old Maud Gonne has embarked on a life of adventure as mistress and political ally to the married Boulangist politician, Lucien Millevoye. She has travelled to Constantinople to support his to work to see General George Boulanger installed as a populist dictator in France. In return, he is to help to establish her as an Irish activist, opposing the British Empire. Meanwhile, the young W.B. Yeats, a poet in need of a muse, has been told by his father that the family are to move to London.

• Scroll down to read on.

• Begin at the beginning here.

• Or find your place with The Story Index

A Life Before is a literary-historical novel, based on the true life story of the English heiress turned Irish revolutionary, Maud Gonne, and the poet she inspired, W.B. Yeats. A story of passion, intrigue, and spiritual ambition set in 1880s Ireland, England and France, it is narrated by Rosy Cross, ‘the oldest woman in Ireland’. Each episode forms a standalone short story that, taken together, build to a whole.

Don’t miss out! Subscribe to receive each episode in the Substack App and a round-up email once a month

Previous <— | Story Index

No Ladies May Land

A steward shows Maud Gonne to her cabin, which is the size of a confessional and she and Chaperone retire to unpack and settle in. A narrow bunk, a basin, a hook for a coat, and a porthole through which the golden coastline shows itself: this will be her home for the next seven days.

She is alone for the first time in her life. Always there has been someone. Nurses, governesses, school-friends, chaperones of the season, all the aunts and uncles with their opinions, Great-uncle William with his rules, Great-aunt Mary with her schemes, Kathleen as a constant since the nursery, Tommy whirling in through her childhood and in the latter years in Ireland, a daily presence. Him and a thousand soldiers, officers and men. If not an actual hand at her elbow, there has always been a doorknob turning, a step on the stair, a voice through the wall, a presence in the room. Now, for the first time, here, nobody but her little monkey, climbing down her arm to curl herself into the crook of her elbow, and look up at her with eyes immeasurably astute.

The ship’s whistle sounds, twice, then there’s the small lurch of the moorings being slipped and the deep shuddering note of the engines starting to move. Through the porthole she sees land, beginning to recede.

‘Well, my little Chaperone’ she says to her. ‘Here we are.’

She blinks at her once, gravely, then she is up and off again.

Maud Gonne readies herself for bed then lies there, watching Chaperone climb and skitter along any surface she can grip, eventually falling asleep watching her antics as she teaches herself how to take water from the drinking bottle fastened to the wall. She is woken many times in the night, by the roll of ship, and the distant sound of its timbers groaning. When morning light eventually dawns through the porthole, it shows nothing but a slab of grey. Her comb and hairpins are sliding the length of the washstand and back again. She lies in her berth, neither well nor ill, a low heave in her stomach, longing for land.

There are people who’ll tell you that being at sea makes a body fees free, but for Maud Gonne, a ship always felt like a prison, and even more so on this lengthly passage, so different from the familiar short crossings across the Irish Sea and English Channel. She heaves herself from her cot, makes a perfunctory toilette, then wraps Chaperone inside her coat to make the unsteady journey up to deck. The revolver Millevoye gave her is in her handbag. The small dense weight of it against her hip as she walks is a kind of company, recalling the weight of his expression as he handed it over, the weight of being the kind of woman to whom such a man hands such a thing.

On deck, a tragedy awaits. Scores of swallows, draggled and done, are lying about the wet boards. The storm must have caught a whole company of them and beaten them down out of the air, on whatever crossing they were making—for they make ferocious crossings, swallows, far beyond what you’d believe possible from a creature that size.

Maud Gonne picks one up into the warm of her hands, breaths on it and chafes its down, gently. It seems to come back to itself a little.

A girl’s voice speaks from behind her. ‘Is it alive?’

Maud Gonne turns and sees a tiny young nun, her dark eyes too large for her face, and her mouth trembling at the vista on deck.

‘It is trying to be.’

The little nun comes nearer. ‘There are so many.’

Scattered the length and width of the deck they are, some on their sides, some on their breasts, wings flung out at angles God never intended. Here and there one twitches and goes still again. The wet boards are stuck with feathers, and a few feathers travel loose on the wind.

‘I know. Poor brave things.’

‘Were they going home?’

‘If by home you mean France, at this time of year it would have been away,’ Maud Gonne says. ‘Their home is wherever the sun is sunniest. And, I suppose, in the skies in between.’

A good way to live, that. Always heading towards the sun, and counting the air itself as a kind of dwelling.

But this was not a good way to die. The girl kneels beside her, gathering her skirts close, picking up another of the birds, copying how Maud Gonne is holding hers, and hawing her warm breath on the feathered creature. They get some bread soaked in milk from the kitchen and then they set about trying to save the broken birds.

The little nun is Armenian, just fifteen years old, and being shipped out by her order to teach French and Christianity to girls in Turkey. Her real name is Nare but since joining the convent, she goes by her religious name, Sister Claire. Her parents died when she two, she has never been outside the convent before, and the ship was already frightening to her. Now this. One by one, the birds are dead or dying. Despite their efforts it’s soon clear that nothing can be done.

She begins to cry openly, not with the pretty tears of a sentimental young lady, but with heartfelt sobs of the helpless. ‘I wish I had not come up,’ she weeps. ‘I wish I had stayed below. I wish I had stayed where I was.’

Maud Gonne takes two of the dead birds and places one in each of the younger girl's hands, then takes another two herself. She goes to the rail, and the little nun follows. She kisses each bird once, and says: 'Grant them thy peace, and let light perpetual shine upon them.' Then, with as much dignity as she can muster, she lets the two small bodies drop over the side, into a sea that has surely taken in a great many of their companions in the night.

She nods to Sister Claire, who repeats the words and the gesture. One by one, the older orphan and the younger kiss their small cold offerings and give them to the water that would have found them earlier, had they not broken themselves on the hard boards of the ship. When the last is gone, the little nun stays at the rail, crying in the way of one who has used up all the noise. Her veil has slipped, and a strand of dark hair is pasted to her wet cheek, but she holds to the rail as if to keep herself from following after the birds.

Maud Gonne could cry too, it has been such a depressing task, but if she did who would the girl have to lean on? She herself could never sit still inside a sorrow. It was her comfort to do something. Console, rescue, create a mock funeral, anything. She fishes in the handbag that holds the revolver for the rosary beads she has carried everywhere this year, reaching past the one to find the other without noticing the mismatch. The rosary is very old, silver gone soft with handling, the beads worn smooth where a thumb has rolled them across the years. It was given to her by Bowie, who is Roman, on the day they buried Tommy.

‘There,’ she says, very quiet. ‘I want you to have this.’

She takes Sister Claire’s hands gently down from where they cling to the rail, opens her fingers, lays the rosary in the palm, and closes her own fingers over the smaller ones within.

The girl looks down at what has been put into her hand, tries to return it, but Maud Gonne won’t allow it. ‘When you are in Turkey, far from home, teaching French to strange children in a strange country, and the days are long and the work is hard—take this out and hold it, and remember the storm and the brave swallows who failed to reach Africa, and how you helped to give them a fair funeral.’

Sister Claire presses the beads to her chest and says something, but too low for anyone but God to catch. Then the two of them, the nun and the girl who is no nun, stand at the rail without any more words, watching the grey water where the birds went down, until the cold sends them back in.

That evening over dinner at the Captain’s table, Maud Gonne asks when they will reach Syra, their first port of call. The next day, he replies. The storm has them behindhand, so it will only be for coaling. She tilts her head at him. ‘Dear Captain, surely you would not be so cruel as to bring us within sight of solid ground and not let us set foot upon it?’

Up and down the table, spoons pause. The English clergyman two seats along lifts an interested eyebrow. The Polish lady opposite pauses her wineglass halfway to her mouth. They have all been waiting for someone to ask.

The Captain feels the gathering of interest, takes his time in replying. ‘Alas, Miss Gonne, the ship’s company will be much occupied with the bunkering and the manifests. Nobody will be free to attend to passengers ashore.’

‘Oh but I am quite undone with longing for land and I’m sure others are too. We can look after each other.’

A ripple of agreement runs the length of the cloth. She lets a small smile travel round the table and back.

‘I should add, since you press the question, that certain unpleasantnesses have occurred lately at Syra. Lady passengers are not at liberty to walk there alone, at any time.’

‘Then we shall not walk alone. We shall walk together, in a great cheerful company, and never go further than your crew’s good eyes can keep us in view from the deck.’ She lets a small smile travel round the table and back. ‘Only for an hour. Half an hour. I myself promise to be back aboard before the coal is half loaded.’

‘Miss Gonne. I do not doubt your undertakings. I doubt the harbour at Syra. The matter is not open for discussion.’

The colonel finds his wine. The Polish lady discovers an interest in the bread. Maud Gonne inclines her head.’ As you say, Captain, of course.’

The second officer, a bearded Corsican with fine eyes who looks like a bandit, has been watching with great interest and Maud Gonne determines to have a go at getting him on her side for a land adventure. After dinner, she spends an hour listening to him talk about Napoleon—after spending a summer with Millevoye, there is nothing Maud Gonne does not know about the Corsican fiend—then slides her question in sideways: would it truly not be possible for her to land at Syra? She so dearly wants to feel the ground beneath her feet.

He shakes his bearded head, vigorously. ‘No, no, Miss Gonne. No ladies may land. If I could take you . . . But no, that is impossible. No one may go ashore tomorrow. The Captain is right.’ He gives her a sorrowful smile. ‘And even if he wasn’t, his orders are absolute.’

The longing in her for solid earth grows the stronger as she sees it approach. She goes on deck to watch. As they pull into harbour the water thickens with boats full of chattering Levantines, holding up every class of trinket and tin and tasselled thing to them, crowded at the rails. The coaling barge connects and begins its labouring at the one end of the ship.

Three hours in harbour stretch out before Maud Gonne like a held breath, then more endless sea days. A Greek with a tray of souvenirs catches her searching eye. Before she quite knows what her hands are doing, she has taken a fifty-franc note from her handbag, waved it at him, and pointed at the shore. The bargain is struck.

In the crush at the rail, no soul who matters sees her hopping down the side ladder and into his little boat, and in no time at all, he has her ashore where the flagstones are steady. It takes her a moment to find her land legs and another to stand on the harbour edge, just for the gift of standing.

Chaperone rides her shoulder as she goes to the post office and sends off postcards, and wanders the dark narrow streets among the shops, as happy as ever she has been. The Greek trails her as cicerone, as the parcels mount up: Turkish delight, pots of rose-leaf jam, cigarettes, flowers. She sheds him by sending him off to stow the parcels on his boat, and takes a table at a café on the harbour, where she can keep one eye on the ship and one on the clock while she drinks her coffee. She eats a cake she has never encountered before—layers of crisp pastry drowned in honey, that stick to her fingers and to her teeth and to the wide corners of her smile—and watches the boats thinning around the ship.

Well satisfied with her excursion, she goes down towards the landing place where the Greek had left his boat, and sure enough, there he is, sitting in it with two other sailor types. In she steps, as high and haughty as she can make herself, to cover her discomfort at being a woman among three men. They sit on, making no move. She tells him to start.

‘There is time to spare,’ he says.

‘Start now, please.’

A few words from him in Greek to the other and they begin to pull, but lazy as you please. It is a glorious evening. The brilliant white of the town behind is softening in the dimming day, and lights from the quay and the ships ripple on the water. Maud Gonne sits back to savour her favourite time of day, trying not to let the hostile faces of the men unnerve her.

The Greek is facing her on the thwart, with the other two doing the rowing. Then she marks that the oars seem to be carrying her the wrong way, away from the ship, instead of towards it. She points at the ship, telling him to set the rowers right. He smiles. ‘Plenty time, lady. Time enough for everything. First we show you famous place. Very beautiful. Best view in all the bay. You will like.’

Knowledge arrives in her body before the mind owns it: in the smell of garlic, sweat and tobacco gone stale, from these men, and underneath that a thicker reek she has no name for but that some older part of her somehow knows entire.

The harbour mouth is widening behind them. The water has gone from playful to deep. A cold trickle runs the length of her spine. The smaller of the rowers wets his lower lip with the tip of his tongue, slow, and looks at her sideways, and looks away again. The oarlocks creak. Nobody on the shore can see them now, and nobody on the ship either.

‘Turn this boat at once,’ she says, but the Greek only laughs at her, and the other two pull the harder.

Her hand is already in her handbag, reaching past the smelling-salts and the folded francs and all the small armoury a lady is permitted to one she is not. Her fingers close around its metal. For your protection, he’d said, and she’d laughed, and thought it a great jape. Now she brings it up out of the bag and levels it at the Greek.

‘Obey,’ she says, ‘or I fire.’

The oars stop. The Greek’s smile is still on his face, but half-set. His eyes go to the gun, and from the gun to her face, and from her face back to the gun, doing the arithmetic. Will she? Won’t she? Does she know how to use the thing at all?

The water slaps at the hull, indifferent. She is some small distance surprised to find that her arm does not shake. The barrel does not waver from the buttons of the Greek’s waistcoat—three of them, brass, the middle one a shade more worn than its fellows. She fixes her eye on that middle button.

‘The ship,’ she says, keeping her voice quiet but commanding. ‘Now.’

| Previous Story |<— | Story Index | —> | Next story in which Maud Gonne’s body begins to declare itself.

Get more from Orna Ross 📚 in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Welcome to my fortnightly poetry reading in which I choose a poem by a Substack poet I admire and pair it with one of my own on the same theme.

This time out it’s two poems about the Christian God, but stretching essential beliefs about Christianity beyond where the stories usually go: the story of genesis and the story of Easter.

The first is from an Irish poet who presents the podcast Poetry Unbound with On Being Studios and has published, most recently, an anthology 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (Canongate & WW Norton) and his own collection, Kitchen Hymns (CHEERIO and Copper Canyon).

He’s also very active on the poetry reading scene and you can catch up with his events and other doings here.

Pádraig is a theologian with a strong spirituality, Christian tinged. My own sense of spirit is more diffuse. What we share is that we were both brought up in the Irish Roman Catholic tradition and have an abiding belief in the mystery and miracle of human life.

These qualities are evident in the poem I wanted to read for you today from Pádraig called ‘Makebelieve,’ which he posted recently on his own Substack.

The text is below, and from me, ‘Breaking Light: An Easter Story.’

'Makebelieve' by Pádraig Ó Tuama

And on the first day
God made
something up.

Then everything came along:
seconds, sex and
beasts and breath and rabies;
hunger, healing,
lust and lust’s rejections;
swarming things that swarm
inside the dirt;
girth and grind
and grit and shit and all shit’s functions;
rings inside the tree trunk
and branches broken by the snow;
pigs’ hearts and stars,
mystery, suspense and stingrays;
insects, blood
and interests and death;
eventually, us
with all our viruses, laments and curiosities;
all our songs and stories;
and our songs about the stories we’ve forgotten;
and all that we’ve forgotten we’ve forgotten.

God looked for something
to hold it all together. Nothing
came to mind.

From Love Between Men, coming September 2026 from Copper Canyon Press and CHEERIO

Learn more about Pádraig and his engaged poetry practice in this wonderful interview with L.C. Camp

‘Makebelieve’ is a poem, Pádraig says, that ‘provides a form by which we can create, and recreate, break and makebelieve.’

Something both he and I have had to do with the complex legacy of faith, repression, and language we inherited as Irish people born in 1960s and 70s Ireland. (He is fifteen years younger than me).

Here is the text of my related poem, ‘Breaking Light: A New Easter Story’. I usually introduce my own poems with a few words of a way in, but as I say in the recording, this one must stand without. It’s an adaptation of what has been called ‘the greatest story ever told.’

 ‘Breaking Light: A New Easter Story’ by Orna Ross

I
While the women wept
and waited,
he picked a flower.

One for his mother.
Another for Mary Magdalene.

His skin was somehow intact again,
though before the soldiers had even begun
to convey him to Calvary,
the theatre of his punishment,
Carthage had salted
and Jerusalem flared
in the rope burns inflicted on his wrists.


II
They’d come for him near midnight,
torches guttering in the olive grove,
the kiss to give him away implanted,
pressed to his cheek. Brought before
the empire’s governor,
he had no last request,
not until the moment,
much later,

after the scourging by Roman flagrum,
leather straps tipped with bone and iron
lashed his back open,

after the long, iron nails were driven
through the soft space
between the carpel bones,
of his palms and soles,

after the cross was lifted
for him to hang between two thieves
and he found that to exhale,
he had to push up through the nail
in his feet, stretching the wound,
and rubbing the lacerations
of his back against the wood,
so that to take a breath
was to choose agony,

after the blood loss from the whipping
made his tissues scream, ‘I thirst,
I thirst,’ and they sent up posca,
the cheap vinegar-water given to soldiers
by means of a soaked sponge
pressed to a hyssop branch,

and he cried to his god to forgive them,
for they knew not what they did.

Death by crucifixion
is a suffocation.


III
Six hours passed, breath
by tortuous breath.
The sun moved across the sky
The soldiers gambled.
The women kept their place: wailing,
at the foot of the cross,

the agony of his mother
bearing witness to the excruciation
and also to what had been
before her son’s fathers’ fathers
created crucifixion.

His conception will soon be taken
from her in the lie of virgin birth
that the power-hungry men,
that gather around greatness
might call one of their own
more high and most holy.

All the raped and pleasuring women
crucified and not yet resurrected.

Afterwards, it was the women
who closed the orifices
anointed him, wrapped
his wracked body,
its still-pooling bruises
still-seeping wounds,
in linens and spices,

and watched the men
bear him to the tomb,
seal him into the dark,
with a great boulder.

Night fell on grief.
Eons turned in dreams.
Light rose over mourning
twice. Then the third day.
The great stone pushed away
like a seed, and he stepped out
into the fog of early morning, reborn.


IV
I see him make his way
not to inn or hostelry
to his family or apostles
but first back to the garden,
where the man-kiss was given
and received. Gethsemene.

There a woman mistakes him for a gardener,
and he sees one of the two thieves,
tending a wild, unruly patch near the trees,
not the one who’d looked up to him
and owned his own wrongdoing,
but the other, the would-be mocker,
who’d asked: if he was truly the son of God
then why wasn’t he saving them?

He knew the thief was hungry,
like him, with the appetite
of three dead days, but still
had to follow the same need
to come here first,

to see children play
and humming birds hum
and orchids bloom
in the misty garden
before they could rise again
into the sun-drenched world.

He picked a flower.
One for his mother
Then another
for Mary Magdalene
while all the while
the women wept
and waited.

A Life Before is a literary-historical novel, based on the true life story of the English heiress turned Irish revolutionary, Maud Gonne, and the poet she inspired, W.B.Yeats. A story of passion, intrigue, and spiritual ambition set in 1880s Ireland, England and France, it is narrated by Rosy Cross, ‘the oldest woman in Ireland’. Each episode forms a standalone short story that, taken together, build to a whole.

Act 1: Story 11 is below. Begin at the beginning with Act 1:1: A Strange House of Time or find your place with The Story Index

Previous <— | Story Index |

Two sisters are saying goodbye to each other on a railway platform at Royat, and you'd never guess they came out of the same nursery. Kathleen, the younger, stands tall and trim in her travelling suit, gloves buttoned and obedient, bound for a Swiss finishing school, where they will polish what is already polished until it shines in its own reflection. Maud Gonne is every bit as well dressed, but her hat is more flamboyant with the veil in which she will shroud herself on her travels folded back to say goodbye. You can see that her mind is already halfway down the line, running south.

Behind them, at some distance, stands Aunt Mary, ancient and upright in black, relieved to be forgoing the burden of her two beautiful nieces, with Figlio, her faithful companion, stationed beside her. They shall chaperone Kathleen to Paris, where she will be met by the mistress of her school.

The sisters have moved a little way down the platform, out of hearing, for a final private moment. It is their first parting since they lost their father and it feels like another little death, this time by railway ticket.

Kathleen reaches for her hand now. ‘You are so brave, Maud, travelling alone. Promise me you’ll be careful.’

‘Careful? That’s your word, darling, not mine.’

By means of considerable strategy and a few lies, Maud Gonne has managed to wangle an unchaperoned voyage to Constantinople and, before boarding, several free hours in the port of Marseilles with Millevoye, her beau. As her ship does not leave until seven in the evening, they shall have twelve whole hours together.

She smiles. ‘I know you actually think me foolhardy.’

Kathleen says, ‘I hope it’s worth it, whatever you have planned.’

‘I think it’s rather up to me to make it so.’

Kathleen’s eyes fill. She kisses her sister quick and hugs her slow. Maud Gonne is not going to allow any sentimentality. She can’t. After a fierce hug, she holds her sister at arm’s length. ‘Come, sweetheart. We shall have such a good time when I return. My birthday celebration. The birthday celebration! Coming of age at last. Hurrah! Then Christmas. And we shall have so much to tell each other. I’m sure you are going to love Lausanne.’

A whistle sounds, down the line. ‘It’s here, look. Your train!’

In it comes, trailing steam and importance, bringing the usual confusion of passengers, porters, trunks, parcels, farewells and people standing in each other’s way. Then the final kisses and goodbyes, French style, and the getting of Aunt Mary and Figlio and Kathleen into their carriage.

The whistle sounds again. Steam billows. The chug and puff and pant of the locomotive quickens. Maud Gonne runs alongside the carriage, waving and making faces, to Kathleen’s amusement and Aunt Mary’s manifest disfavour, until the platform runs out beneath her feet and the train takes her sister away.

She stands alone for a moment, with the fact of where they now are: she and Kathleen going their separate ways across the map of Europe. From Marseilles she will sail to Constantinople, to stay for a month or more with her oldest friend, Lilla White, daughter of Sir William White, Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Sir William and Tommy had been thick as thieves when both were young men with diplomatic prospects before them; and Lilla had spent a goodly part of her girlhood being quietly exported to the Gonnes, where she shared the lessons, loyalties and little conspiracies of the schoolroom and nursery with the sisters.

On hearing of Tommy’s death, and of her friend’s illness afterwards, she had written at once. Her mother was to be abroad for some months; might Maud please come and stay with her and her father in Constantinople? The gentle winter would be good for her health. To have her there would make Lila so happy, and Sir William too. They had all felt dear Tommy’s loss so keenly.

Constantinople. The city Tommy had marvelled at above all the cities he had seen. Constantinople: minarets and markets, veiled women, blue water, tiled palaces, spice and silk and foreign tongues; a place so far from Ireland, from England, from relatives and burial grounds, that grief might lose its scent there. East and West leaning into each other like two old disputatious companions who had forgotten what started the quarrel but were determined not to finish it. A city balanced between worlds. Even the name had a shimmer on it and its older name, Byzantium, was even finer.

To put the cap on it, Millevoye grew very excited when told. ‘The English Ambassador, eh? Eh bien, eh bien!’ He’d taken both her hands as though congratulating her on an appointment rather than a convalescence. ‘The things one might learn in such a household, non? A conversation overheard. A despatch box not quite closed.’

Could she listen at doors and keep an eye out? Of course she could.

So now here they are. All going to plan, Millevoye will meet her on arrival first thing tomorrow morning and, as her ship does not sail until seven in the evening, they will have twelve whole hours together.

By all measures, she ought to be intoxicated with expectation. Millevoye has told her she is doing splendidly. She is going to Constantinople! And Marseilles! She should be—she is—counting the minutes. Why this taste of ash in her throat? No time to think; her own train leaves in an hour. Now that her aunt is safely dispatched, she has to get back to the hotel and make her illicit arrangements.

Marseilles in October is a city in a good mood. The sea is the kind of blue you cannot quite believe in, the sun is still kind, and the people seem cheerful, everywhere. Even the market-women have their hair beautifully coiffed, paying a few sous on the way to work to have it elaborately dressed.

Millevoye is at the platform when her train c in, as arranged, she saw him before he saw her. The dark coat, the moustaches shaped to their fine points, the high handsome forehead bent over his reading. Then the sight of his smile breaking over her as he picked her out from the crowd. He’d kissed her hand and then the underside of her wrist, with a small flick of his tongue.

She still feels the imprint as they walk, now, hand in hand, admiring the town. Nobody knows them here to disapprove. They can do it, so they do.

‘Ma chère, I have wonderful news.’

‘Boulanger is to be a success? I never doubted it.’

‘Today, there is no Général Boulanger. Today there is only us.’ He squeezes her hand. ‘It turns out I am free until Friday. We can have our day together and now also… a night.’

‘But my boat sails at seven this evening.’

‘A boat is a boat. It can go without you, another will follow.’

‘Lila is expecting me, Millevoye. Sir William is expecting me.’

‘Sir William will be just as useful to us a day or two later.’

Also a night. The phrase ought to thrill her, would have thrilled her last week in Royat and yet, here on the Marseilles platform with her trunks already on a porter’s cart, something puts her back to it.

'No. No, I'm sorry. It would be wonderful, of course it would be wonderful, but with the changing of tickets, and telegrams to Lila, and all the things that could go wrong…’

‘Bah. This are piffling things compared to time together.’

He tells her how he has imagined it all in detail, planned the hours, chosen the room. He had thought she’d be pleased. His face does that thing that French faces do when something has gone against them and they are too well-bred to admit the wounding. Here, she knows, is where she is supposed to crumble, bring in the apology and the revision, yet the wounded face—to her own surprise—is not softening her. If anything, it is steading her, settling the ‘no’ in her deeper.

He takes her arm too tightly, walks her too fast through the old port. She steers her into a queer little sailor’s restaurant on the quay, where he proceeds to sulk over the lunch he had arranged for them, an excellent bouillabaisse.

Maud Gonne sets herself to be as charming as can be, drawing on every skill she has learned from her time with Tommy to melt a man’s mood. No use. He is having none of it. Most of his remarks over lunch are addressed to the patron, and to the clever parrot near their table, who can curse like a sailor and sing the Marseillaise, word perfect and in tune.

Is this a row, she wonders? Are they having their first row? It should feel larger than this, more operatic, more two-sided. This is only a small dull thing, like a door not quite shutting. She understands why he is hurt but not why is she so set against his offer. She loves him, after all and he is, by his lights, offering her a thing she ought to want. No bruise, no name to put on it.

Eventually it is a small monkey who brings him round. After lunch, they go exploring the little shops full of strange birds and stranger creatures, brought back by sailors from all over the world. In one such, among the macaws and the mongoose, Maud Gonne finds a small marmoset monkey with a face like a worried clergyman, and falls instantly in love.

The shopkeeper sets her on a perch, where she folds her hands and inspects her audience. She raises one fastidious eyebrow. It seems she is not impressed. The shopkeeper gives Maud Gonne a grape to offer. The marmoset accepts it with both miniature paws and turns it over twice before beginning to nibble.

Maud Gonne is enchanted and buys her on the spot. ‘I shall call her Chaperone,’ she announces. ‘She shall travel with me and guard my virtue.’ Then a long look and a whispered aside to Millevoye. ‘Since no one else seems much inclined to.’

He laughs, his first real laugh of the day, and she records the victory.

The rescued afternoon settles into something almost like the day as planned. They take coffee at a little café on the port and watch the boats come in. Millevoye points out the boats by their nationalities—that one Turkish, that one Greek, that low one Italian, and tells her the names of things she did not know needed naming. Maud Gonne feeds the marmoset crumbs of brioche, which he takes with both hands, examining each one as though it might be counterfeit.

On the surface of sea it seems as if, suddenly and impossibly, there are hundreds of oranges in the water, among the boats. Maud Gonne thinks some boat of fruit must have foundered but Millevoye says no. C’est le marché, the fruit market. When the oranges go unsold, the stallholders tip them into the sea.

Maud Gonne thinks of her childhood staying at the house of her Aunt Augusta and Uncle William, how sparingly they used to dole out oranges and other fruit. ‘No, that is terrible. They should give away them to poor children, surely, instead of throwing them to the waves.’

‘They cannot just give them away,’ Millevoye says. ‘Their prices would drop.’

The bright oranges bob and turn in the blue waves of the harbour. ‘It seems such a waste.’

He shrugs, consults his pocket watch. ‘Cherie, there is one final thing I must do.’ He pays for the coffee, and steers her to an armourer’s. She watches, puzzled, as he handles one revolver after another, testing them out—he has a perfectly good revolver of his own. She well knows that it lives in the inside pocket of his coat; she has felt it against her side.

Millevoye weighs each small gun in his palm, sighting along the barrel, testing the action, asking the shopkeeper questions in his rapid southern French. He chooses, in the end, a neat little thing with mother-of-pearl on the grip. A lady’s gun, to keep in handbag or muff. Outside, he presses it into her hand. ‘Try it. Hold it up. Point it at me.’

She does as he says, makes a small pop! sound with her mouth, ‘You’re dead!’

‘The size is right. You shall carry it always.’

‘It’s for me?’

‘If you are to travel alone, with only the little Chaperone, then you need a revolver. Promise me.’

She offers, for form’s sake, to pay him for it.

‘It is a gift,’ he says. ‘Pour notre alliance. If another man comes near you, you are under orders to shoot him on sight.’

She means to laugh but the laugh does not come. ‘I shall not forget our alliance, dear Lucien.’ she says. ‘I shall be away only a month. And before I return to England at Christmas to see my guardian and receive my trust, I shall make sure to see you in the way—’

She hesitates. There is no word given to a lady for this use. She can’t get her tongue around any relevant word without scraping something.

He draws her down a side street and pulls her to him. He kisses her slowly, with the grave deliberation of a man signing a document. Right there, where anyone passing might see them.

Is anyone watching? Do they think they are man and wife? Or— No, she wants to cry out. He is stitched to her flesh, but she is not his wife. She is his mistress. His mistress! What a strange word that is. She rolls it on her tongue, and the dark hiss of it slides down some back channel of her mind. Her heart begins to beat so wildly she is near sinking to the ground. She clings to him and lets him kiss her once, twice, many times.

‘I love you,’ he whispers, as she begins to pull away.

Then he holds her at arm’s length. ‘I love you!’ he repeats, devouring her with a fixed look. ‘I love you too much. À Noël, then. Until then, I shall be a man in waiting.’

And now he is releasing her, and walking her down to the quay. Now he is leaving her at the gangway and raising his hat and giving the formal goodbye acceptable to others. Now he is stepping back, and striding briskly towards the cab waiting a few yards away.

She goes up the gangway like one sleepwalking, unable to feel the steps beneath her, all her thoughts flying from her. At the top she pauses and turns. There he is. M. Lucien Millevoye: orator, writer, politico; quick with a pistol, gentle to animals, gallant to women. A tall, dark and dashing blade of a man, with a face cut for a coin and also the sort of handsome a man arrives at rather than is born with. How vital he has become to her, and how quickly.

She could not now describe the stranger presented to her at the bandstand, on the day of the storm. That man has been worn away, by the slow modifications from acquaintance to friend to confidante to beloved. Yes beloved. She loves this man on the quay, now raising his hand to her, in a small wave. She has taken in his voice, his gestures, the turn of his thoughts, the meanings inside his smiles, his most intimate self.

How exactly she is supposed to conduct herself in the arrangement they are slipping into is not a question she needs to put to herself, not yet. He loves her; she loves him; that settles the sum for her. The arithmetic of his wife and small son she cannot calculate. All she can tally in this moment of stepping away from him is how it is bringing her the most tenderness she has felt for him yet.

Now she regrets not having skipped the boat and spent the night. He is right, they have such little time together, they must always seize the day. She always will, in future. She throws him now a long kiss with both hands, a kiss that embraces the water, the shore, the whole tumbling sprawl of Marseilles, of France, of the world, as well as the man.

He returns it lightly, a flutter of fingers to the air—then the cab takes him. He is gone.

| Previous Story |<— | Story Index | —> | Next story in which Maud Gonne must use the revolver. |

• planning

• production

• promotion

with a particular focus on the quirks of this platform.

Substack was not designed for serialising your novel but it can be used successfully, if you understand how the different parts come together.

Thank you to those who attended live for your great questions.

Get more from Orna Ross 📚 in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

A Life Before is a literary-historical novel, based on the true life story of the English heiress turned Irish revolutionary, Maud Gonne, and the poet she inspired, W.B.Yeats. A story of passion, intrigue, and spiritual ambition set in 1880s Ireland, England and France, it is narrated by Rosy Cross, ‘the oldest woman in Ireland’. Each episode forms a standalone short story that, taken together, build to a whole.

The 10th story episode is below. Begin at the beginning with 1:1 A Strange House of Time or find your place with The Story Index

Previous <— | Story Index |

This is How to Live

Maud Gonne is pleased to see Millevoye pacing by the river outside the door of La Belle Meunière, waiting for her. As her cab rolls up, he grinds out his cigarette under his boot and strides across, reaching them before the wheels have quite stopped, his hand out for hers. He helps her down with that flourish of his that makes a step from a carriage feel like a descent from somewhere on high and pays the driver without looking at him. His eyes are all for her, travelling over her, slow as a tailor’s measure, from the lace at her throat to the hem above her boot.

‘Mon Dieu,’ he says, low. ‘You will ruin a man’s appetite, Mademoiselle. Who could think of truite à la belle meunière with such a vision in the room?’

She laughs as she is meant to but the laugh comes out a beat short. Her nurse’s loving hands, and her loving disapproval, are still on her. Maud Gonne can feel each pin she placed doing its job along her scalp, small points of pressure holding more than her hair.

‘Is everyone here?’ she asks, brightly.

‘Yes, they arrived early. They are taking photographs.’

‘Photographs?’

‘Oh don’t be alarmed, photographs of Boulanger.’

‘Ah.’

‘Are you nervous?’ he asks.

‘Not at all.’

He gives her a sideways look, tucks her hand into the crook of his arm.

She smiles. ‘Perhaps a little.’

‘A little is correct. Too little and one is a fool, too much and one is a child. Un peu—that is the dose for a grown woman. Do not fret. The Général is the easiest man in France to like, you will see. He has been a soldier all his life, a politician for just fifteen minutes—it shows in the best of ways.’ He covers her gloved hand with his own a moment. ‘Come… before the trout despairs of us.'

As they enter the drawing room the first thing she sees is a man down on one knee. For a half-second she takes it for a proposal—only the woman is standing behind, and holding out a sugared almond between finger and thumb. Then she realizes that the object of attention is a small white dog, a terrier, under a chair. This big-shouldered man, made smaller by his pose, is trying to coax the animal out. ‘Viens Bijou.’

‘Essayons ça, Georges,’ the woman says, proffering the sweet.

The man is Général Boulanger. The woman is Vicomtesse de Bonnemains. The dog is unimpressed.

Over by the hearth a thin, patient man in a grey coat stands beside an angled tripod and a camera under its black hood, wearing the air of one who has learned that great men cannot be rushed. The photographer.

Déroulède is first to spot the new arrivals. ‘Ah! Enfin. Le renfort arrive,’ he says, folding up the newspaper he had been reading and unfolding himself from the chair. Paul Déroulède, leader of the Ligue des Patriotes, is already well known to Maud Gonne from the day of the storm, and from the morning at the Grand Hotel when she’d lip-read his side-mouthed pronouncement of her. He is longer and leaner than she remembered, all forehead and mournful intelligence. He gives her a conventional bow, a dry smile. Général Boulanger is not the only one she needs to win over this evening.

The général gets to his feet to greet them. The terrier, freed, shoots across the room to shelter under the chaise.

‘Mademoiselle Gonne,’ says Millevoye, ostentatiously ignoring the dog. ‘Permit me. Général Georges Boulanger. Mon général, Mademoiselle Maud Gonne.’

Millevoye presents her in that way of his, like she’s a portrait he’s commissioned, and Maud Gonne is so wound up she fears she might disgrace herself with a laugh.

So here is the hero of the hour. Medals off, uniform and disguises hung up, he whose woundings and exploits are lifting France off its feet, is tonight only a man in a good coat, hair greying but streaked red-gold where the lamp finds it. Not tall as soldiers go—a fair bit shorter than herself—but well-built, handsome, and vigorous. Of an age with Tommy, and carrying himself as Tommy did, the soldier still present when the uniform is off. And those famous eyes. Every newspaper in France has had a go at those eyes, and and now that Maud Gonne is under their clear, grey, fully attentive gaze, she sees the most the most ardent adjective they laid on him fell short of the mark. Some things don't take ink.

‘Enchanté, Mademoiselle. Forgive me. The dog has not yet learned who is master.’

‘Perhaps he has, mon coeur,’ says the woman beside him, ‘and that is precisely the trouble.’

Everyone laughs, and in the laughter Maud Gonne is passed to Marguerite, Vicomtesse de Bonnemains. She has a fineness about her. Small-boned, dark-hair, dove-coloured silk.

‘We are all so pleased to meet you, Mademoiselle Gonne. Lucien has told us nothing useful about you whatever.’

‘Marguerite!’ Millevoye murmurs a small protest.

‘And this,’ she says, ‘is Madeleine, Mme Brohan, best known as Madame B. She shall tell you everything useful about us. Men are always so sparing with the meaningful details, don’t you think?’

Madame B is the oldest person in the room. Fifty-four by the calendar, ten years younger by the candlelight. Dark-eyed, and possessed of a particular poise, the kind that comes of being looked at from a thousand seats and learning what to give back to the looking. Millevoye has, in fact, told Maud Gonne a good deal about her—about them all—and Madame B is of more interest to her than even the Vicomtesse. A star of the Comédie-Française, she was once mistress to the Prince de Joinville, son of King Louis-Philippe, which has kept her private life as public as the weather for decade. She has only just retired, after a career so long and so applauded that the papers wrote up her bowing out like it was a state funeral.

The public secret nobody ever printed is that she has a child with Déroulède, conceived twenty years ago, when he was still a minor—he is thirteen years her junior. He has supported the boy, now a young man in military training, and passes him off as his godson.

‘My dear, we are being immortalised,’ she says, gesturing at the camera and its patient custodian. ‘M. Lavalle here has been sent from Clermont to make likenesses of the Général for his supporters. It is the third plate of the evening. The first two were spoiled by— Well.’ She glances at the chaise, where a white nose is just visible beneath the valance. ‘By our newest recruit.’

‘He was a gift,’ says the Général, with dignity. ‘From the ladies of Riom. I could hardly refuse.’

‘You could,’ says Deroulède, looking at the dog with what seems like quiet hatred. ‘But you did not. And now the Republic waits on a terrier.’

‘Oh come, Paul,’ says the viscomtesse. ‘The Republic has waited on worse.’

‘Mademoiselle Gonne,’ Deroulède says, with an apologetic shrug. ‘You find us at our most ridiculous.’

Millevoye touches her elbow, a touch that sparks through her silk glove, and she is steered toward the hearth. A glass of champagne is put into her hand. She is the youngest person in the room by a decade, and she knows it, and the knowing makes her feel younger.

‘Bon,’ says Madame de Bonnemains, with the air of a woman returning to business interrupted. ‘Let us proceed then, without Bijou.’

Deroulède groans. ‘Marguerite, mon Général, I beg you. This interruption gives you time to reconsider. Please.’

‘Pouf!’ says Marguerite. ‘Paul, we are in Royat. The plate is going from this room to Monsieur Lavalle’s studio in Clermont, and from Monsieur Lavalle’s studio to a frame in my dressing table drawer. And that is the whole of its journey.’

‘And the negative?’

‘Will be smashed,’ says Lavalle, from beside his camera.

‘Will be smashed,’ Marguerite repeats. ‘You see.’

‘Negatives are smashed every day, as you know, and next morning find themselves whole again in places unexpected. You know that in the wrong hands, this photograph is a weapon.’

‘I’m sure my loyalty to the Général is as true as yours, dear Paul, and I do not believe there is any such danger.’

Deroulède looks angrily toward Général Boulanger but his gaze, soft as butter left out in the sun, is all for the lady.

‘Monsieur Lavalle,’ Marguerite calls across the room. ‘We are ready.’

Monsieur Lavalle, who has posed bishops and mayors, comes forward, indicates where she is to take her place on the chaise, arranges her hands in her lap, places the Général beside her—standing, with his hand upon the chair-back above her shoulder. He squints, tilts his head, adjusts the Général, adjusts Marguerite a quarter-inch the other way.

There’s the small dry click of the shutter, and then comes the whoof — a flat clap of sound and a flare of magnesium so white that, for a half-blink, it strips the colour out of everything, leaves every face looking printed like a saint’s on a holy card. The smell off its smoke overcomes the smell of the lamps and the lilies.

Marguerite blinks twice. ‘Très bien, une de plus. Last one now, of the group.’

‘I want nothing to do with it,’ says Deroulede.

‘Silly man. Pouf! Mademoiselle Gonne, we can rely on you?’ She appeals to the company, ‘Mon général, you agree I’m sure? Look at her. It would be a crime against the plate not to include her.’

Général Boulanger bows. ‘Mademoiselle, you would honour us.’

Maud Gonne looks to Millevoye, who meets her with the smallest nod, one you’d hardly notice, and she allows herself to be placed.

M Lavalle arranges them as a gardener moves pots on a terrace. ‘The General here, please, standing, again behind the seated Vicomtesse. Mme Brohan, beside Madamoiselle. Là, s’il vous plait. A little to the left please. Everyone, turn towards the light. M. Millevoye, un peu moins de gravité, Monsieur. Merci.’

Maud Gonne can feel Millevoye at her back, a hand’s width away. From this angle his eyes can travel over her shoulder and down to what the lace at her décolletage is meant to shield. She is glad of every stitch. Or not glad. She doesn't know which, only that she is aware, and the awareness has a heat to it, and the heat has a kind of shame, and the shame has… there's no time for the next thing, for Lavalle is squinting again, tilting his head, and ducking back beneath the hood.

The room holds but then, into the perfect stillness before the plate takes, the terrier strolls out from under the chaise.

‘Mon Dieu,’ says Lavalle, from under his hood.

Millevoye groans, but the ladies all laugh as Bijou crosses the carpet at his leisure, and sits down squarely between the General’s boots, looking up at him with an expression of calm proprietorship. Very well then, you can be mine, after all.

The General looks down, gathers the small white nuisance into the crook of his arm. All smile—except Deroulède who has his newspaper on his knees again—and no one more widely than Marguerite de Bonnemains. The General sees and there it is again. His whole self tilts toward her the way a sunflower tilts, and with about as much choice in the matter.

‘Encore une fois, M Laval. With my colleague this time.’

They hold again, infinitely more themselves this second time. The flash. The whoof. The white blink. success. The plate takes. Behind her shoulder, quiet as a man laying down a winning card, Millevoye says, ‘There.’

She turns and smiles. ‘Can we get our own copy of this photograph?’

‘Certainement.’

With the timing of a woman who has run an inn for twenty years and can hear the click of a finished course through three walls, Mme Quinton appears at the door to say dinner is served. The Général leads them through, the dog still in the crook of his arm.

The dining room is small but very charming, and every surface has been pressed into duty. A bowl of late dahlias, blood-red and rust, sits at the centre of the table, in pleasing contrast to the white cloth. The fire flickers cosy in the grate, and above it a stag's head presides — glass-eyed, antlered, disinterested. Maud Gonne is placed between the Général at the head and Millevoye on her right. Across from her is Madame B. Déroulède is opposite Millevoye, and the Vicomtesse holds the foot of the table.

Millevoye pours the wine. Mme Quinton sets down a tureen and a basket of her famous brioches; ladles soup into flat Auvergne soup dishes, then withdraws.

The dinner begins to do what such dinners do.

At first they speak of nothing much. The weather. The waters. Whether that really had been the Empress of Austria seen at Royat this year, or only one of her doubles. They enjoy Mme Quinton’s celebrated blue trout signature dish, poached so fresh from the river it nearly remembers how to swim. Then a coq au vin dark as church wine but far more cheerful. Delicious, home-cooked food, good country wines, and by the third glass, conversation robust to match—about xxx.

When the plates are cleared, cognac and coffee come down at each elbow according to request, and a parade of treats is passed about the table. Raisins and almonds, figs split open, chocolates wrapped in thin tissue. The ladies do not retire.

Maud Gonne, watching them across the rim of her cognac glass, falls in love with the whole table at once, with the air they make in the room. No. Not in the room. In the world. A Général who keeps a dog on his knee at dinner. His mistress holding the foot of the table and trusted to hold his ambitions. An actress with a bastard son in officer training and his father two seats down calling him by Christian name (also Paul) and nobody’s eyes dropping to the soup. And still looking at his long-time companion with a slightly dazed gratitude, their bond more durable than most of the marriages Maud Gonne has seen. Her own Millevoye, with a Republic to overturn before bedtime, and his hand squeezing her leg under the cloth. None of them flinching from any of it, from anything.

She thinks: This is how to live. This is what Tommy meant when he said one must never be afraid of anything. Her thoughts have shed their connecting tissue somewhere between the second glass of wine and the figs but she feels how she could hold the foot, or even the head, of a table the way Marguerite holds it. She could carry herself through gossip the way Madame B carries herself, letting it fall away behind like water in the wake of a ship. Millevoye was right: she could love a man and not require a certificate to do it. This way of living is as heady as the brandy.

It is Déroulède, who is incapable of passing a meal without putting France on the table, who brings in the politics, reading to them from the newspaper he’d brought to the dining table. It seems Général Caffarel, Under-Chief of Staff at France’s War Office—a post he owes to Général Boulanger—had been in close relations with an adventuress who has been procuring ‘decorations,’ the Legion of Honour and other honours, for those willing to pay. Minister of War, Général Ferron, has asked that Boulanger be arrested, for his connection to Caffarel, along with the others. ‘The journalists are, no doubt, hotfooting it to Clermont-Ferrand as we eat,’ says Deroulède.

‘Let them come, says Boulanger. ‘I shall tell them what this got-up scandal is. A manoeuvre directed against me by my jealous successor.’

Maud Gonne notes that the general says little but when he speaks the room arranges itself around what he has said. In this too, he is like Tommy. Millevoye picks up the newspaper to read for himself. ‘But wait,’ he says. He looks askance at Deroulède. ‘You did not tell us the best part…’

‘I was about to, but why don’t you give yourself that pleasure, my friend.’

‘Oh it is too good.’

They all lean in. ‘Well go on,’ says Madame B.

‘It seems another person has became implicated in the proceedings against the culprits.’

‘“Another person!”’ says the Vicomtesse. ‘What person? Oh, Lucien. Do not tease.’

‘None other than—’ he pauses for effect, ‘—M. Daniel Wilson,’

‘What? Grévy’s son-in-law?’

‘Yes,’ says Millevoye, consulting the newspaper. ‘Formally accused... but not arrested. Continuing to reside at the Élysée, with Grevy protecting him. The President refusing, “on principle”, to believe in his guilt.’

‘Principle indeed,’ says Deroulede. ‘What principle? That one cannot believe ill of one's own relations?’

Millevoye turns to explain to Maud Gonne, who has been pretending to know what they are talking about. ‘You understand, Mademoiselle? The President’s son-in-law has been selling honours for cash—and from inside the palace. Medals of the Republic, honours of the nation, hawked from the president’s own house like wares off a barrow.’

She can see his mind turning over, planning the article he will write himself.

‘Grévy will have to resign,’ Deroulède says. ‘The whole rotten edifice of government is shaking loose at its foundations. And when it fall, as it surely will, we must be ready.’

‘The newspaper campaign is running. The constituencies are moving,’ says Millevoye. ‘But the timing—’

‘The timing!’ Boulanger interrupts, with the impatience of someone who has heard this word too often before. ‘Always this word: the timing.’

Maud Gonne hears her own voice in the room. ‘The timing will be what the timing will be, Général.’ This is what Tommy used to say to her when she became similarly frustrated.

Five faces turn to her, six if you count the dog, and she suddenly feels very shy again. She hadn’t meant to speak, she has had too much alcohol, but Tommy’s words are in her mouth, and she has been holding her own at tables of generals since she was seventeen. ‘One cannot time a tide. One can only be ready to catch it.’

Madeleine Brouhan, who always tires of political talk sooner than the rest, says, ’I thought you had to time a tide to catch it.’

‘Oh, we humans can read a tide-table, Madame B, but only the moon has ever managed its timing. She does not take instruction.’ A glance and a small lift of her glass toward the Général. ‘Not even from handsome, celebrated, dog-loving generals.’

Everyone, including Madame B, laughs.

‘Indeed Mademoiselle,’ the vicomtesse says. ‘The timing is what it is. The choice is whether to be in the boat, or on the shore, when it turns.’

‘The constituencies are moving,’ Déroulède says. ‘In the Nord, in the Somme—’

‘In the Somme they have always moved,’ Boulanger says. ‘I want the Rhône.’

‘The Marseilles rally will confirm it,’ Millevoye says. ‘If we put a thousand in the hall—’

‘Put ten thousand on the street,’ Boulanger says, ‘and the hall takes care of itself.’

Maud Gonne nods her head, a little too vigorously, and feels the room take a little spin.'A hall tells a man what he’s said,’ she says, as it rights. ‘A street tells him what was heard.'

Boulanger laughs, a genuine laugh, startled out of him. ‘Precisely Mademoiselle.’ He looks at Millevoye. ‘You did not warn me.’

‘I warned you,’ Millevoye says, comfortably.

Maud Gonne slowly lets out a sigh, so slow it’s invisible to anyone else, but from the other end of the table, the vicomtesse catches her eye. A half-second of mutual measurement passes from the older woman to the younger. I see you. You see me. Mind yourself. Maud Gonne has never had such a look from a woman before. Aunt Mary’s looks are all surveillance and Kathleen’s are all concern. This is something else—appraisal between equals, or between what might one day be equals.

The Vicomtesse says ‘George, you come and sit down here now. I want to get to know our new guest.’

They make the swap, now the three men are together and the three women.

‘Madeleine, you have been too long an actress ,’ she says fondly to Madame B. ‘She cannot resist the line that brings down the curtain,’ she says to Maud Gonne.

Madame B shrugs. It is of no consequence. ‘Millevoye tells us your father was a soldier, Mademoiselle,’ she says.

‘A colonel in the British Army, yes.’ She turns her glass once on the cloth.

‘Yet you are Irish?’

‘Irish,’ Maud Gonne says, and is happy by how firm the word comes out.

‘On your mother’s side?’

‘She too was English but there is Irish ancestry on both sides.’ Maud Gonne has no idea if that is true but she determines to herself to find some Irish forebears. ‘My objection is not to English people but to the British Empire. My father was a better man than the system he served.’

‘Bon. I have always thought the Irish and the French understand each other. Both Catholic, both bullied by our Protestant neighbours.’

‘And both with an understanding of revolution,’ Madame B murmurs.

‘My mother was Welsh,’ says Général Boulanger, smiling up to them from the bottom of the table. ‘And my father is a Breton. I too have the Celtic nature from both sides, Mademoiselle.’

Millevoye, beside her, gives her the look a man gives when his horse has cleared the high fences and is cantering towards the line.

This, thinks Maud Gonne, smiling back to him, and to the Général. This.

| Previous Story |<— | Story Index | —> | Story 1:11 A Man in Waiting in which Millevoye sees Maud Gonne off on her first Boulangist mission in Contantinople |

A Life Before is a literary-historical novel, based on the true life story of the English heiress turned Irish revolutionary, Maud Gonne, and the poet she inspired, W.B.Yeats. A story of passion, intrigue, and spiritual ambition set in 1880s Ireland, England and France, it is narrated by Rosy Cross, ‘the oldest woman in Ireland’. Each episode forms a standalone short story that, taken together, build to a whole.

The 9th story episode is below. Begin at the beginning with 1:1. A Strange House of Time or find your place with The Story Index

Previous <— | Story Index |

NOW READ ON:

It is Bowie, her old nurse, who gets Maud Gonne ready for the big night, which I find fitting. Sorry, bad joke—forgive an old woman her small humours. When I tell you about that good caregiver, and how she prepared her charge for what was to come, you may understand my little pun. And maybe even join me in my crooked smile at how different were the emotions that .

Bowie—also known to the Gonne girls as Biddy Bounce-Bounce and, on those rare occasions that called for it, by her real name, Mary Ann Meredith—was more than a nursemaid to two army orphans. Life ran, then as now, on the unreckoned labour of such women. The cooks and companions and lady’s maids and governesses and laundresses and charwomen, thanked at Christmas with a length of cloth and a kind word and then, when their situation changed or their bodies gave out, let go with a small purse and a written character.

The world Maud Gonne inhabits, and will one day trouble, is floored and roofed by women like Bowie. It owes them a debt not yet sorted or settled, a hundred years on. I wonder myself if it ever will be.

You’ll recall that Bowie stumped up the money when the impresario made his demand of the starstruck Maud Gonne. Ever since Aunt Mary made it clear that the inheritance is safe, she has wanted to let Bowie know that all is well, that she’ll be repaying her with interest. She wants to do more than that, she wants to repay her for everything and she has a plan that she can’t explain in a letter. It must be to her face.

So she has laid siege to Aunt Mary. A last holiday for our dear nurse, Aunt, after all she has done for us. What is one more passage, we have plenty of room? Tommy would have wished it. I’ll pay for it myself, as soon as my trust come through. Aunt Mary eventually agrees.

Bowie deserves better than this new position she has taken with the Ffrench-Power family in Hampshire, Maud Gonne declares to Kathleen, as they walk up and down the platform, waiting for the train that is to bring their nurse from Clermont-Ferrand. She is unhappy with this English family that is much on their measure. It is time that she hung up her nurse’s cap.

When Bowie steps down from the train, black bonnet on her head, familiar carpet bag in hand, both girls are upon her at once. No thought of ladylike composure or watching or passing gentlemen. ‘Bowie!’ ‘Biddy Bounce-Bounce!’

She holds them both at arm’s length to look at them properly, as she has every time they have come back to her since they were small. Then she gathers them in again.

‘Look at the two of you. Just look at you. Oh, what grand young ladies.’

Her cheeks are wet. So are theirs. The memory of Tommy, ‘the Colonel’ as he was to Bowie finds its way into their embrace, making them all cling tighter, while the train lets off its steam and pulls out behind them.

She is introduced to all their friends. Millevoye bows over her hand with the full Parisian flourish, and Bowie gives Maud Gonne the same look she gave her at six when she came in with frog-spawn in her pinafore. Afterwards all she will say is, ‘Well, well, a Frenchman, no less.’ Maud Gonne is ashamed to tell her he’s married.

She takes the Royat waters once and declares the whole palaver a puzzle to her. Lukewarm sulphurous water seems a poor reward for all the trouble of getting wet. She prefers the gravel promenade, the bandstand music, and, best of all, the balcony of her bedroom, where she sits in the evening watching autumn evening light going soft over the rooftops, silently listening as her girls’ talk, with the satisfied air of a woman who has come a long way to see a thing and is now seeing it.

Such is the holiday for three sweet days together. The fourth is the day of Maud Gonne’s dinner at La Belle Meunière, organised around the absence of Aunt Mary’s household, on the last expedition of the season—a day in the mountains, planned down to the picnic napkins. They are up before light. Carriages arrive at ten for Aunt Mary in her travelling cape, Kathleen with her sketchbook, Lady Jane and Rose and Figlio and all the rest. All except for Maud Gonne who, seeing her opportunity, had pleaded fatigue when the plan was being made. Her lungs, she’d explained. The cold air. A cough, helpful as a hired man, caught in her throat to make the point. The altitude. It was too much of a risk.

Kathleen looked at her the way you'd look at a page you've already read and don’t understand but Aunt Mary only said, ‘Bien sûr, chérie.’ Two months of keeping up with her intractable niece has seen her, like Uncle William before her, grow tired. As Bowie had already declared that she would not be ascending any volcano, dead or alive, by road or rail, Maud Gonne will be chaperoned. All are happy, or near enough..

Bowie knows all about Millevoye by now, Kathleen has filled her in. And she’s been told about Maud Gonne’s big meeting with Géneral Boulanger and his lady and has agreed to cover for her. Unwilling to let anything spoil her blessed time with the girls, and aware besides that she’s no longer in any position to forbid anything, she has tucked her own views on the matter behind her teeth. Their unspoken agreement is simple enough: So long as Maud Gonne does not ask for her blessing, Bowie will volunteer no warning.

The dressing begins at five. Bowie lays out the paisley foulard silk, the dress most suited to a young woman in demi-deuil taking a simple rustic dinner with friends.

‘Underdone is better than overdone,’ Bowie says.

So many times Maud Gonne has heard that saying of hers. This time, standing with her in the lamplight, seeing both their faces in the cheval glass with its small tilt to one side, she understands that this time is likely the last. It was Bowie who put her into her first proper drawers, who chased ribbons, fastened stockings, washed mud from hems, combed burrs from hair, warmed little shifts at the nursery fire. How can this body of hers now belong to the same small person Nurse bathed and dried and dressed back then? Yet it does, in some seam under the silk that no glass can show.

Bowie eases the jacket off Maud Gonne shoulders, hangs it over the back of the chair. ‘Now Lamb’ she says. ‘Up with your arms.’ The chemise is lifted on. The corset cover tightened. The petticoat is tied, the second petticoat over it. Each garment is offered and received by custom, but tonight every knot, every hook, every small tug of fabric has a weight in it. Bowie had helped to dress Maud for her coming-out ball the year before, but that was society’s ceremony. This is something older, something never told.

‘Now the dress, Lamb. Stand still.’

The foulard comes down over her head in a soft hiss of silk. Cream ground, paisley figures in mulberry and grey, the print lively enough to catch the eye, subdued enough to behave itself. Half-mourning’s discipline without black’s severity. Bowie settles the shoulders, adjusts the neckline, steps behind her.

‘Twelve buttons, lamb. Stand still.’

She begins at the small of the back, working up. All the while Maud Gonne is thinking about when to tell her about the money. When she sits to have her hair done, she decides. Through the glass would be the best way to have this conversation, less embarrassing for them both.

She has done the arithmetic. Bowie’s wages were £35 a year with bed and board, and so few expenses. To run even a modest cottage, she’d want £100 a year coming in, a careful £100 should be enough. Interest on her savings, once Maud Gonne has returned them with her own interest paid, would yield her only £8 a year. The shortfall, Maud Gonne intends to provide out of her trust fund.

Bowie carries on buttoning. The third button. The fourth. She is humming under her breath, a little low tune Maud Gonne remembers without remembering. The fifth button. The sixth. The seventh. Outside, the day is lowering into evening. Somewhere below, a carriage wheel strikes stone in the courtyard, and Maud’s stomach gives a little answering turn. She is nervous, she realises. It is good to have this Bowie business to think of, as distraction.

The twelfth button is done. Now for the finishing touches. Black lace at the cuffs, the fabric eased back over the small bones of the wrists, and at the throat, to cover her décolletage.

Time for the hair. Simply dressed, they agree. No aigrette, discreet pinning, a small jet comb at the back. Maud Gonne takes her seat. Yes, she is nervous. Her hands, in her lap, are cold. Her stomach is a small rolling sea but it is fine. She can be nervous with Bowie as with no one else except Kathleen.

‘Bowie, I have something to tell you.’

The whole story comes out in a tumble. Aunt Mary’s announcement, Uncle William’s deception, Tommy’s provision, the inheritances. ‘So you see. I shall pay it back, every farthing and ten times over. More than that. You shall not have to take another posting. You will be able to leave the Ffrench-Powers.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I have worked it out. You shall have a cottage, not a large one, but with a garden. You can enjoy the retirement you deserve with a life of your own.’

Bowie smiles, says nothing, just carries on brushing her hair. Maud Gonne gives her a moment to take it all in. Bowie’s own hair has grey at her temples, come in since she last saw her. She feels good about this change she has offered. But why is Bowie not responding?

‘Don’t you see? You shall never have to take another posting.’

‘My lamb.’

‘I’m sure you should like a garden? And then you’ll be free to Kathleen and me every summer, or we shall come to you, whichever you prefer. I think I’ve thought of most things but you must tell me what you will need’

‘Hush a moment, lamb. No. This won’t do.’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘You’re such a good girl, the best of girls. But I cannot take it, Not as you mean it.’

‘Bowie—’

The brush, which had been moving in long slow strokes through the auburn hair, slows, then stops. ‘When you put your money into that theatre company, I knew well enough it might be a fool’s errand, but I had the money, and you were what I had it for. Yes, I’ll take it back when you come into your own. With the interest the post office would have paid, since you’re set on interest. But no more than that.’

‘Bowie—’

‘No more than that.’ The brush starts to move again. The hair lifts under it, so much hair, the colour of a chestnut just out of its husk. ‘As to the future, I’ll admit that for a nurse there’s the job you do for the child, and the job you do for the wage, and that with you and your sister it was the first and with the Ffrench-Powers it is, so far, the second. Mrs Ffrench-Power is not the employer your dear father was. But…’ She pauses, searching for the right words. ‘I have minded my own keeping all my life, lamb, and I should not like to be living off the keeping of another.’

Maud Gonne, for once, has no answer. The brush goes down, the hairpins go in, one by one. They watch her evening face arrive in the mirror, the cheekbones lifting with the hair, the chin now silhouetted, the eyes framed. ‘There now, my pet,’ Bowie says, placing the last pin. ‘Stand up and let us have a look at you.’

Maud Gonne stands. The look is perfect, the fabrics harmonising with the low-key elegance of her jet jewels and the matte whiteness of her bare skin where it can be seen. Bowie crosses to the mantel and takes a tea-rose from the small arrangement there, pinches off the stem with two fingers, and pins the bloom to Maud Gonne's bodice. Maud Gonne, seeing that Bowie wants no more said on the other matter, and not knowing what else to say in any case, gives a little half-twirl, expecting the kind of admiration Bowie has been giving her since she was four. But then something gives. Bowie’s face collapses and she begins to cry. A full, helpless cry.

‘Bowie!’ Maud Gonne has never seen Bowie in tears, the idea is unthinkable. ‘Bowie, what is it?’

‘Nothing, nothing. Don’t mind me. A foolish moment.’

But it is not nothing. It is as if grief has jumped out from behind a curtain and taken her over. Maud Gonne does not know whether her sobs are for the working life she still has waiting for her, or for their old life together when Tommy lived, or the future she has refused. Possibly a braided thing made of it all? She does not know.

But she does not need to know what her dear nurse does not wish to confess. She turns from the glass and takes Bowie by both arms. ‘Hush now. Hush, Biddy Bounce-Bounce.’ She kisses her firmly on the forehead, and on each wet cheek, and a fourth time on the forehead. ‘For luck,’ she says.

Bowie laughs, a wet small laugh.

‘Think about what I said.’

‘Never take no for an answer, eh?’ Bowie dabs her eyes. ‘You were always the same. I won’t change my mind but thank you for your kindness. You’re a rare one, Miss Maud, it has to be said. To care as you do. Mind that no one takes advantage of that big heart of yours.’

She gathers up Maud Gonne’s gloves, her reticule, her wrap. A spray of the Guerlain perfume Aunt Mary had chosen for her and told her to always wear. There, the fitting is done.

Bowie, fully recovered, gives her charge an ordinary hug. ‘Do what the colonel would have wanted you to do tonight, and you won’t go too far wrong.’

Maud Gonne leaves. Bowie stands in the small pool of lamplight at the dressing-table, with the empty hangers on the wardrobe door and the signature scent still hanging in the air. She listens to the steps going down the stairs, across the hall, out into the courtyard. The familiar sound of young ladies she loves leaving into their evenings, a sound I know myself from others who walked away into worse. She imagines her going out the gate and into the carriage Millevoye has sent for her.

The father who’d made a great show of Maud Gonne, the uncle who’d lied to her, the aunt who’d paraded her and now dropped her: none of them has fitted her for what lies ahead. And neither, and there’s the rub, has she. She has given her, and her sister, all she had to give. She has lived to serve them but loving and serving were not the same as arming, and arming is what she needs now.

Bowie tucks the spare pins back into their dish, smooths the bedspread where the dress lay. For one held breath she lets herself see it—the little garden, the fireside of her own, the seaside trip each summer, Kathleen and Maud Gonne on either arm of her—and then, with the same hand, she smooths the wanting back to flat. She turns out the light and returns to her room.

| Previous Story |<— | Story Index | —> | Story 1: 10 This is How to Live in which Maud Gonne meets General Boulanger and agrees to an alliance with Millevoye |

Hello and welcome to my poetry picks for this week. I’ve changed things up a little bit on the poetry front. I’ve written about it in notes and you may have seen the note?

Going forward as well as reading you one of my own poems, I have decided to also take a little wander around Substack and gather in some of the poetry that I’ve been reading myself and really enjoying.

There are so many great poets here on Substack and the poetry community is just gorgeous and I’m really loving being part of that and connecting with these wonderful poets.

What I’m going to do is pick a poem that is in some way linked thematically to my own pick of the week.

The poem I wanted to read for you today of my own is called ‘Halo’. And then I’m going to be reading a poem, ‘Ars Poetica,’ from a Substack poet called , known on socials as theguelphpoet.

I didn’t know her work at all until I came to her here on Substack. And I have been really enjoying not only her poetry, but her entire Substack, her whole way of doing things and approaching being a poet in this space.

She writes creative essays and craft lessons as posts and writes her poems in Notes, a very effective model, I think.

Her vibes, she says, are ‘achy, truthful, challenging, and gutsy.’

As well as writing and publishing her own poems on Substack, she also hosts popular writing table, Gather. Learn more about that here. And her new book

‘Halo’ and ‘Ars Poetica’ are united by both being poems about writing. Not just writing poetry, but writing and language in the broadest sense.

Halo by Orna Ross

I’ll start with ‘Halo’.

Halo by Orna Ross

I wrote this poem a long time ago. It was included in an anthology back in 2013, but I know I wrote it some years before that. So it was quite an early poem of mine and it’s one of many poems that I’ve written about writing.

So… what you need to know for this? That I grew up in a pub in Ireland, in rural Ireland—front-room pub and shop were part of our house.

And as children, we would be out in the bar sometimes during the daytime, you know, depending on how busy my mother was. She had five children and ran this business while my dad was in work in town.

So occasionally we would be in the bar while it was quiet—just the daytime drinkers in—being minded Ann or Johnny, who would be packing shelves or whatever.

And we used to play rings.

Some of you bar flies may be familiar with rings as a bar room game, know what it is?

Essentially, you throw rubber hoops at a board that’s covered in hooks. And you try to get the bigger numbers and whoever gets the biggest score wins.

So yeah, that’s rings. And I think that’s all you need to know to get the sense of what’s going on here.

My brother Conor used them as they should be used,
the rings: hoops of grey rubber to throw 
at numbered hooks on a board,
and make the grown-ups 
who came to our place for their daily drink 
call out: 'Well done.'

To me,
they were things to twirl 
atop my four-year-old pointy finger 
till they flew,
or to array my arms,
making of me a Sheba 
or a Cleopatra, 
queen of places with names 
like Abyssinia 
or Timbuktu.
Their circle of air was a space
pregnant with everything.

And the blackboard,
where you were supposed to chalk 
the tally was where,
up on a bar stool,
I liked to practice writing.
A and B and C.

And where one day,
with dust dancing 
round a nearby ray of sunlight,
I was caught by a moment 
I now know will hold me rapt
through all eternity.
When meaning came swimming 
towards me, in white, out of black, 
and set me smiling.

Apple! and ball! and cat!.

Behind me, Connor threw a ring.
And the men were calling,
'Yes!'
'Score!'
'Good man yourself!'

while I cast off,
lay down in language,
bracletted wrists aloft.

Ars Poetica by Maria Giesbrecht (The Guelph Poet)

So now for Maria’s poem.

As I said, it’s also about language and poetry and being a poet and the birth of a poet, as it were. And she wrote this for World Poetry Day back in March, on her Substack, The Guelph Poet.

‘Ars Poetica’ is Latin for The Art of Poetry. It’s a short poem, but packed with a punch.

So greedy the way writers choose 
   to live. Eyes dying 
to kerosene all on their own.
   Fingers with a saviour complex.
Mom didn’t want us 
   to be loud, but in the womb 
already, I grew a tongue 
like a tire. I had a way out.
   I put my mouth to paper, 
pressed muscle until hard 
   and drove my way into this world.

I love this. I love the power, that sense of creative energy, which insists upon its own being. So thank you so much for that, Maria

And thank you so much to you, dear readers and listeners, for tuning in this week. I’ll see you next week for another ‘One of mine and one of yours’.

Thank you so much for listening and happy writing and publishing.

Bye-bye for now.

A Life Before is a literary-historical novel, based on the true life story of the English heiress turned Irish revolutionary, Maud Gonne, and the poet she inspired, W.B.Yeats. A story of passion, intrigue, and spiritual ambition set in 1880s Ireland, England and France, it is narrated by Rosy Cross, ‘the oldest woman in Ireland’. Each episode forms a standalone short story that, taken together, build to a whole.

The 8th story is below. Begin at the beginning with Story 1: A Strange House of Time or find your place with The Story Index

Previous Story <— | Story Index |

NOW READ ON:

We Women Must Be Beautiful

There’s a woman in Royat, Marie Quinton, who knows more secrets than a monsignor. La belle meunière was the name given to her as a child, ‘the beautiful miller-girl,’ daughter of the local millhouse and, yes, renowned in the district for her good looks.

Alas, all that got her was a marriage, at eighteen, to a wealthy but most violent man. Her father, the miller, died young, and with him his defence of the marriage he’d arranged. The laws of France being more liberal than her male parent on the matter of wives being battered, Marie quickly divorced the husband, and went back to her maiden name and the house she came from. There, with the aid of her mother and sister, she turned three storeys of solid Auvergne stone overlooking the river into a celebrated auberge, and called its restaurant after herself, or the self she had been as a girl: Restaurant de la Belle Meunière.

There too she kept a journal, in the same observant and romantic hand with which she steered her hotel and that’s how we know about the fateful events that happened within.

It’s October now and the season has turned. The Parisians and their servants have repacked their trunks and decamped back to the city and all the businesses in Royat are exhaling, like women who’ve just removed their stays. Woodsmoke tangs the air and all along the Rue du Paradis the chestnuts parade their annual blaze of copper and rust and gold, a match for the skies arrayed by the fading sun most evenings.

La Belle Meunière is empty of guests and full of the smell of new wine, sharp and yeasty. Mme Quinton is elbow-deep in the year’s crop, decanting and bottling with her sister in the cellar when old Françoise calls down the little back stairs to say two men have arrived at the door, wanting dinner.

‘You told them we are closed?’

’They’ve asked to speak to you.’

What’s this, she wonders, drying her hands and going up. Officers in civilian dress: her trained eye reads it from the set of their shoulders. The younger is fair, slight, fine as a coin. Not yet twenty by her reckoning, with a gentleman’s face and clothing. The elder: tall, dark, built like a sideboard, moustaches magnificent enough to have their own opinions. He clocks her with a look she’s had from certain men all her life, valuing her the way a cavalry officer values a horse and she accepts it as she accepts the weather, taking appropriate cover. Such looks once cost her dearly and she intends never to pay again.

He explains how they’re sorely in need of a good home-cooked dinner, and her establishment has come recommended to them, and it is even more charming than they had been told, and as they know it is out of season, they will of course make the inconvenience worth her while if they might dine here--and all said in such a smooth and flattering way that, without ever intending to agree, she somehow finds herself in the kitchen digging out ingredients and giving the necessary orders.

She feeds them well, receives more compliments for her table from them both, and more complimentary looks for her person from Mr Moustaches, and expects that to be the end of it—but while paying, they put in a request to see the rooms. Upstairs, they examine the options under her lamp with the care of men who seem to be thinking of something more than comfort: opening windows, reckoning up each door, mapping corridors. After they’ve run a finger over the dressing-table to try to find dust, and bounced on the bed to test the mattress springs, they settle on the first-floor suite, with its two bedrooms and a dining room.

‘Would you be willing to convert the smaller bedroom into a dressing room?’

She nods assent.

‘And can you have all in readiness within two days?

‘For how many nights, Monsieur? Is it for yourself?’

He looks to the younger man, and jerks his head toward the open door. The younger man crosses to close it and Marie Quinton has a small, silent panic, as any woman would if closed into a bedroom with two soldiers, one with a gamey eye--and this woman knows as much as any the ways of violent men. As he leans towards her, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, she is very still, running the arithmetic of exit through her mind.

But no, it’s alright. ‘We have friends of great distinction,’ he purrs, ‘who require great discretion. If they choose your hotel as their residence for the weekend, it is necessary, Madam, to ensure that no one, do you understand, no one, can suspect their presence here. You and you alone must attend to them. No servant is to enter the first-floor corridor or stairs for the duration of their stay. The greatest precautions must be taken to ensure that they are not recognized.’

She waits.

‘It shall be made well worth your while.’ That phrase again.

All meals are to be taken in the upstairs room, aside from one more formal dinner, which the couple will host. He himself would attend, with another gentleman and two other ladies. Six in all. This meal should be served in the dining room below but no other guests are to be allowed.

He passes her a sizeable banknote to do the rest of his talking for him.

She looks at the note and wonders what risk accompanies such a payment, vastly in excess of what the rooms would fetch in high season, never mind October. She’d clearly be getting herself into some class of an intrigue.

‘May I ask,’ she begins, ‘whether—’

‘Madame Quinton, I believe you are a woman for whom discretion outruns curiosity.’

Now she wonders if this man might be a politician. He’s a bit too smooth for a soldier. A thought is wrinkling her mind, a bold suspicion. Might he be representing him, he whose escape to Clermont on a locomotive caused a riot in Paris, as he barely avoiding being suffocated by the people who idolise him?

‘With your agreement,’ he continues, ‘your guests shall arrive the evening after the morrow, sometime after seven o’clock. And the dinner hosted the evening after.’

Her mind spirals around her supposition. That is the payment that interests her, that such a man might sleep under her roof. And so she consents. She spends a sleepless night doubting that she is correct. It could not be the general. All of France knew that strict orders had transformed his residence in Clermont into a prison from which he was forbidden to leave. She berating herself each time she woke for taking on this work, just as she’d been beginning to enjoy autumn leisure.

In the morning, she wakes to a rising certainty, and growing excitement, that she is right. She cannot compete with the gilded splendour of the grand hotels in Royat but she can create a haven filled with joy, light, and flowers.

First she makes up the beds in the cream guipure lined with pink satin that matches the curtains. The wall hangings are a fabric of no great value but shot through with subtle silver sequins, which means the rooms are at their best by night, when lamplight sets them glittering. She removes the clock. Parisians are so nervous, especially military men, and a clock only marks time that he might prefer not to count.

Mother and sister are installed in the far wing without too much explanation, and old Françoise is told to stay in the kitchen and how she must be useful but invisible. Fires are set in all the grates, ready for the match.

The next day, she goes into Clermont for flowers and candles and she puts the biggest vase in the clock’s place, with two six-branched candelabras either side. At the dressing table, a lamp fitted with a rose-pink glass tulip sheds light that would flatter a gargoyle. At six she lights the fires. At ten-to-seven, a little early just in case, she pushes a doorstopper in place to hold the front door ajar, as ordered. The weather has turned to tempest, and wind howls the rain in, all over the hall floor. She waits in the front room, trying to read a book. Seven o’clock. Quarter past. Her ears ring in the silence. Then: the outer door opens, slowly and softly.

Her heart goes ahead of her as she hears muffled steps enter and she goes out into the hallway. A heavily veiled woman in an otter-fur coat has just passed, and is being followed by a tall man with long brown beard, carrying two enormous valises. Disappointment! It’s not him. She has left her front door open, with gusts of wind and squalls of rain invading her hall, opening all the doors below, threatening to extinguish the nightlights and making all the rooms draughty and damp, for these strangers.

As she climbs to the first floor behind them, something in his movement tells her that the man is, in fact, the tall suave man who’d inspected the rooms, now sporting a false beard over his magnificent moustache. She follows them upstairs to the bedroom, where the lady stands in the doorway, unlacing her coat. Marie Quinton steps forward to lift the heavy otter-fur from her shoulders, which she allows without turning round.

The tall dark man deposits the valises and issues more hotel orders. ‘You will leave the downstairs door ajar as I found it until nine o’clock. On the stairs, ensure even less light, if possible.’ And he takes his leave.

So another is yet to come? Her fixed idea returns to her. It might yet be him and this might be the woman with whom he is said to be besotted. The woman who—like herself—is divorced but who managed to keep enough of the money to be able to fund his campaigns. The woman who has entirely made him her cause as any woman surely would, if she had the wherewithal.

She turns and Marie Quinton is surprised to find a face gentle and simple, almost virginal. No shame of any kind in evidence. Her entire appearance is imbued with the word the tall man had used about her and her companion: distinction. A truly great lady—not made, but simply born such. She smiles and hands her two small keys: ‘Please unpack the two suitcases.’

Mme Quinton takes the valises to the dressing-room, and opens them. A delicious scent escapes and an improbable quantity of fine linen, toiletries, clothes, frills has been compressed in there. As she unpacks, the lady goes back and forth, searching among the objects, taking various things with her into the other room.

Once the unpacking was finished, Marie Quinton stows the valises at the top of the wardrobe and under the bed. Then she stands, uncertain what to do with herself. Should she stay or leave? This new job as a lady’s maid leaves her a little bewildered, even faintly resentful. She has never taken such intimate orders from anyone before and she can’t say she likes the feeling.

‘Would you come here for a moment?’ The lady calls and she goes to her in the main bedroom. She is seated in an elegant white dressing gown at the dressing table, in the rose-gold glow of the lamp, her blond hair unbound. With a gesture, she indicates the city clothes she has just removed: an otter-fur coat, the hat and veil, a traveling dress of Capuchin cloth with black braid trim. Mme Quinton carries them into the next room, and determines to leave now.

The lady stops her with a raised hand, beckons her over again, and addresses her directly. ‘So we are going to live near you for a few days… You will get to know us and you will host our friends tomorrow night?’

She nods to this summary of what they both know.

‘This dinner is important. We are considering a young person who may be useful to our cause.’ A small pause. ‘Despite the mystery that must surround us, Mme Quinton, I want to tell you that we work for a great cause.’

She nods.

‘And that we have come to you because we know who you are.’

What can they know of her? Her divorce is the only thing to know. Everything else about her is ordinary, hardworking, everyday.

‘How you have been already to me confirms that we are not mistaken. I thank you for your tactful hospitality.’

Her light brown eyes are warm in the rose lamplight. Extending her hand, she says very softly, ‘I feel we shall be friends.’

Marie is wholly moved to be spoken to in this way, by this person. The best answer she can give is to drop to one knee and kiss her delicately offered hand.

‘Will you assist me in dressing?’

A grand lilac satin evening gown, covered in black lace is laid out on the bed.

All resentment has vanished. ‘Of course.’

It takes them almost an hour to complete hair and jewels and dress and when finished, to Mme Quinton, her visitor is a vision of magic. Diamonds sparkle everywhere. The shade of her fabrics and glitter of her jewels harmonise perfectly with the matte whiteness of her bare neck and shoulders and arms, the plunging neckline revealing what it reveals in the most artful way possible.

Marie Quinton lets out a cry: “Mon Dieu, Madame! How beautiful you are!”

She smiles at this outburst of enthusiasm. ‘We women must be beautiful for those we love, must we not?’

An hour later, Mme Quinton is tending the fire in the front room when the tall man lets himself and another into the hall, the two of them conferring in urgent whispers. She stays behind the front room door, peeking through the crack, reluctant to interrupt. This second man can be seen, side on, and yes, it could well be him. He is the right height and build, more substantially bearded even than his companion but that, no doubt, is a disguise.

The tall man hands over a small suitcase and says, ‘Tomorrow then, at nine.’ He leaves, closing out the weather at last, and she goes out.

Yes, yes! It is him! Marie Quinton knows his face better than most. Earlier that year, she’d cut his engraving from an illustrated paper and pinned it up over her bed. His image adorned even the humblest cottages all over France but few fell asleep looking at him each night. And in July she was among the crowd in July that welcomed him to the Auvergne. She had run down to Clermont as she hadn’t since she was a girl to see him ride in, a spectacle she would never forget.

The sky was a clear blue, the sun magnificent that day, and nobody was in their right mind. All of Royat, all of Clermont, all of Auvergne it seemed, were pressed into one heaving sea of humanity from the tollgate to the Place de Jaude. She heard dialects and saw headdresses that come from fifteen to twenty leagues around. An old peasant beside her declared he had not seen such a crowd since the Emperor himself came through, and she believed him. Every few minutes the refrain broke out across thousands of voices — En revenant d’la Revue — and at the line about admiring the brave General Boulanger, a single cry tore from every throat at once: Vive Boulanger!

Then the bugles and the drums—distant, then closer. The entire width of the road was taken up by officers from all branches of the army, riding in full dress uniform that glittered as if sprinkled with gold. Several generals in white breeches surrounded him but they rode quite close, only a few meters from her. And there, perfectly upright on a magnificent black horse, the grand red ribbon across his torso, chest studded with decorations, his bicorn gleaming beneath the white plume. Him!

And now here was the man, not the general, standing before her in her own hotel. He is said to be fifty but looks no more than forty. His size is average, his clothing simple tonight: a jacket and dark blue striped trousers under the coat he is now unbuttoning. A tie suited to the turned-down collar, a ruby ​​carnation pinned with a diamond. He has a military look even out of uniform but it’s the eyes that settle any lingering doubt caused by the false beard. Everyone has written of those eyes, and now that she is under their gaze she understands why. So intensely grey, so deeply set in their hollows, giving prominence to the eyebrows. Infinitely pale, infinitely sombre.

She leads him up the stairs, without betraying how her head is swelling with pride, her heart with joy that the idol of the crowds and the woman he loves have been entrusted to her care. Perhaps it is from Clermont (might it even be from here, from Royat, from her house?) that he will leave to make the strike for victory over the government, whose muddy scandals keep rising, and then onto the recapture of the lost provinces? Why else come here? Why else all the secrecy?

Should she show him that she recognises him, or should she pretend she does not know? When he rings, should she approach him by saying: ‘My general?’ No, she decides. They, he and his lady both, need time to trust her. Let them reveal what they believe to be a secret if they wish. They will be more peaceful and happy if they believe they are unknown or ignored. On the first landing, she indicates the room. He bows to her, he who has the whole of the Auvergne at his heel, and smiles.

Then he knocks softly at the door. From within, her voice calls entrez, and he goes in. She hears two words before the door closes—two names intertwining, two cries echoing, two exclamations as one:

‘Oh Daisy!’

‘Oh Georges!’

Such intensity. It holds Mme Quinton there, standing at the top of the stairs, imagining. She pictures the scene behind the closed door, the lady throwing herself into the gentleman’s arms, he squeezing her so tightly he almost crushes her, she wanting to speak, but he silencing her with his lips. He covering her with impetuous, furious kisses, on her hair, her forehead, her eyes, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, everywhere his mouth meets her flesh. And she succumbing, consenting to be so kissed.

An indescribable scene of bliss, delirium, happiness is envisaged by la belle meunière. A thing she never had, never will have. Looks from the likes of his sidekick, the tall moustachioed man—that’s as close as she’ll let any man get to her again. She has no use for men. She has made a perfect life without them. Her love is all for her mother, her sister, her hotel. Yet how would it feel to be kissed so urgently that you cannot speak? To make a religion of another person.

Oh Georges.

Oh Daisy.

She goes downstairs to finish preparing their food.

| Previous Story |<— | Story Index | —> | Story 1:9 A Life of Your Own in which Maud Gonne makes an unusual offer and makes her old nurse cry. |

And thanks to , , , and many others for tuning in.

Althea Gyles was a poet and artist from a prominent Anglo-Irish family, which according to W. B. Yeats, was ‘so haughty that their neighbours called them the Royal Family.’

She became estranged from the family, left for Dublin and then London to become an artist, worked with two of the most successful Irish writers of the day: Yeats and Oscar Wilde, had a love affair with publisher and pornographer Leonard Smithers, and turned up in a book by Aleister Crowley.

Her artworks were stunning and have lasted. In 2016 I reproduced one of her covers for a collectors’ edition of 500 books, which sold out.

W.B. Yeats said of her poetry that

Miss Althea Gyles may come to be one of the most important of the little group of Irish poets who seek to express indirectly through myths and symbols, or directly in litt…

Read more

This is how Dickens published, how Eliot published, how Gaskell and Dostoevsky and Stowe published — in parts, mailed out to readers who waited and were changed by the waiting. As the story lived between episodes, turning in the reader’s mind at a pace close to that of real life, the rhythm of anticipation and returning made it matter more.

Substack is making all of that possible for fiction lovers again—and with one thing those nineteenth-century readers never had: you can write back. Tell me who you’re rooting for, what you think of Rosy’s interpretations, if you spot a typo…

Each episode is written to stand alone, to be a satisfying piece in itself, while moving the story forward and building, over time, into a whole. You can read at your own pace, join at any point, and find your place easily using the story index page. (Scroll down for Chapter One and there are easy links from there).

I began serialising at the end of January, and I’ve just finished some behind-the-scenes improvements I needed to make before pressing on.

And I’ve also put together a sample of the first chapters for those who want to put those on an e-reader. I’ll also provide each act in that format when complete (there are five acts in all). When we get to Act 5, the story will go behind a paywall to be fair to those who will buy the book.

A Life Before is the story of Maud Gonne and W.B. Yeats’s coming-of-age.

Born into privilege but betrayed by those who should have protected her, Maud Gonne is determined to live at full blaze — breaking every rule of 1880s convention, if that is what it takes. But even the cleverest, most spirited young woman cannot entirely outrun her times.

Told in the magical voice of Rosy Cross, ‘the oldest woman in Ireland,’ A Life Before is a true-life story of first love and first power: a portrait of two larger-than-life characters before the world knew their names.

This sample contains the opening chapters of Maud Gonne’s story, introducing her family and Lucien Millevoye, the seductive politician who encourages her to become Ireland’s Joan of Arch.

It also has the first of the ten conversations W.B. Yeats has with the people who shape him—and whom he must outgrow if he is to be worthy of Maud Gonne.

Download Sample

This is a work in progress, and that is precisely the point. You are not being handed a finished object—you are being invited into the hot heat of creation, where the story is still alive and still becoming.

If Rosy’s voice catches you, if Maud’s blazing, baffling choices make you want to know what she does next — then come and join us. The series is all here, waiting for you, and there is nothing I would like more than your company for the journey.

Subscribe now

Before Maud Gonne or W.B. Yeats's became the icons we remember, they were young and unfinished, each reaching for a life of their own in a way that made their stormy connection inevitable. A Life Before tells the story of those early years. A dual coming-of-age story drawn from real lives, real letters, and real history, told the old way—in instalments.

Set in the 1880s, against a background of royalism and anarchy, mysticism and magic, the story follows Maud Gonne as she is drawn into a love affair and political cause in France—both more dangerous than she knows—and the dreaming poet, also yearning for greatness but lost in fantasy.

Narrated by Rosy Cross ‘the oldest woman in Ireland’ who has her own reasons for following the pair through two separate worlds that will soon collide, each episode is a complete short story you can enjoy on its own.

Read in order, the stories gather and deepen across five acts into a full novel.

Your options:

• New here? Begin at the beginning with 1:1 — A Strange House of Time, and read on.

• If you’re already following, find your place and jump right in below.

• Want notifications? One or two new episodes land each week. Subscribe below to be notified (in the app) when each one drops and receive a monthly roundup email.

Subscribe now

Paid subscribers also receive each Act, once completed, as a downloadable ePub file. Sideload onto any e-reader.

Act One:

1:1. A Strange House of Time In which our narrator Rosy Cross introduces herself and her trade, and takes us to the French spa town of Royat, where Maud Gonne lies awake before dawn, sobbing over a man.

1:1. Drowning Herself for Pleasure In which Rosy Cross takes us back to the first meeting between Maud Gonne and the elegant Boulangist politician Lucien Millevoye.

1:3. Amber Scorched with Honey In which Maud and Millevoye’s courtship deepens through politics, poetry, and sightseeing drives—until Great-Aunt Mary drops a cannonball on the drawing-room rug.

1:4. The Small Business of Truth In which we learn how Maud Gonne’s stage career to date has been a disaster but she is now more concerned with getting an explanation from Millevoye.

1:5. That Note of Soft Command In which Millevoye confesses all and asks Maud Gonne to become his mistress and his political accomplice.

1:7. Being Who She Was In which Maud Gonne weighs a conventional life against the one Millevoye is offering — and, high on the slopes of the Puy de Dôme, makes her choice.

1:8. We Women Must Be Beautiful in which General Boulanger arrives to Royat to consider Maud Gonne’s suitability for the cause

1:9. A Life of Your Own in which Maud Gonne makes an unusual offer and makes her old nurse cry.

1:10. This is How to Live: In which Maud Gonne meets General Boulanger and is pulled into the political intrigue of his circle

1:11. A Man in Waiting: In which Maud Gonne and Lucien Millevoye spend a day together in Marseilles and he gives her an unusual gift to take to Constantinople

1:12. No Ladies May Land: In which Maud Gonne must use the revolver Millevoye gave her.

1:13. All the Men of the World: In which Maud Gonne’s body begins to declare itself..

Act Two:

2:1: Our Friend in the East: In which Maud Gonne receives old and new proposals.

2.2:

I have come to you now.
Open your ears
the pores of your skin
the blades of your back.

Look. I have come
because my face knows yours
and it is time.

Let go of your pathways.
Unself yourself.
You have come so far.
I do not want to abandon you
on a road.

Listen. My sound is like
the praise prayer of a lover.
Its pulse is calling you up, 
up beyond the underbelly swell 
of the tide, the wing face of the wind
the hidden side of the cloud.

Yes, I am asking you to fly.
Have I not given you the skies?

There are new episodes from A Life Before, including the one that first introduces W.B. Yeats and his family, and a post for readers about how to enjoy serial fiction.

I also put together a post for authors where I share what I’ve learned, so far, about serialising a novel on Substack.

And in the poetry slot this time there’s a sonnet about long love. The Hub and I will be celebrating 40 years together this year, and yes, he’s the inspiration for this one.

Dip in as you wish, skip lightly over the rest, and let me know your thoughts, any time.

With love (and moonlight!),

READER CLUB

Monthly Salon

Reader members gathered on March 3rd for our monthly creative salon, under the full moon, prompted by a quote from a recent post by Elif Shafak, from her recent post here on Substack: ‘We have Art Not to Die of the Truth.’

In the intimacy of audio (cameras off) we first reviewed, renewed or released the intentions we set under February’s dark moon, and did some f-r-e-e-writing around the individual ways in which we, in Shafak’s words, ‘turn to art for light, to literature for wisdom, to nature for humility, and to each other for strength.’

The replay is now available for members.

Next full moon is April 2nd and we meet at 5pm for Risings, in honor of Easter and the launch of my latest poetry book, Breaking Light: Poems for Easter and Other Resurrections and a new box set, Poetry of Light.

Join us for questions, answers, presence, practice … and of course a little poetry, right here at 5pm UTC April 2nd. (A separate invitation should issue from Substack shortly)

Happy to see you there!

FAQ

An FAQ for want to know more about the reader club and what to expect.

Everything you didn’t know you wanted to ask about my reader club. Early releases, discounts, subscriber specials, monthly salons and more

ARTICLES

FOR AUTHORS

FICTION

POETRY

[Image credit: Parlor Picture. 1983. Barbara Rossi]

What do you want to create in your life? More time or more experiences? More home comforts or more travel? More intimacy or more alone time? More fun or more meaning? More art or more money?

All of the above?

Or is what you really, truly want not on this list? Perhaps you dislike thinking about life in this way, finding it reductive, superficial, even crass? No matter. Whatever way you think about it, you have things and experiences you want to make. Everyone has.

To be human and alive is to want.

When your creative process is in full flow, the essence of that desire becomes a creative intention, conscious or unconscious.

That intention then channels your creative attention into the actions (work, rest and play) that take your desire through the seven stages of the creative process.

Intention plus the right kind of attention is what turns thoughts into things, ideas into experiences, desire into done.

This is the process of conscious creation, a natural process that unfolds endlessly in every moment, within us and around us, consciously and unconsciously.

When the way is clear, it moves briskly along and we feel a sense of fulfilment, all the way through the process.

Creative Block

Sometimes, though, we hit obstacles or blocks. We feel cut off from a sense of possibility, we doubt our ability to make what we want, or we’re so removed from our own desires that we don’t even know what they are.

The day after his thirty-second birthday in October 1804, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wailed to his notebook:

“So completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month—O Sorrow and Shame. . . . I have done nothing!”

Alas, it was true. After a period of flow in his twenties, which produced unforgettable poems like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”, Coleridge was by this time in the grip of what he called “an indefinite indescribable Terror”.

When a friend tried to get him to rouse himself, the poet gave his famous description of the psychic helplessness of the blocked creative:

“Go, bid a man paralytic in both arms rub them briskly together, and that will cure him. Alas! he would reply: that I cannot move my arms is my complaint”.

Thanks to the daily self-flagellation poured out by procrastinating writers all over the Internet, even those who have never written a professional word know all about writer’s block. It’s much less understood that the dynamics of creative block works in just the same way for everything.

What afflicted Coleridge is the same syndrome that sees so many New Year’s resolutions falter, that makes people feel incapable of doing what they most want to do.

When blocked, we waver, we falter, we doubt, we deny, we resist, we despair. We feel low and lack energy. We experience the disillusion, disappointment and ineffectual despair expressed so well by Coleridge.

Ours is a conventional, not a creative world, and in it this deluge of broken dreams and unattended wants is so common, so everyday, we don’t even think it worthy of record. It’s “just life”, we say, when it’s the very opposite.

It’s life being stalled, blocked, broken.

Creative Ignorance

If we don’t know the workings of the creative process, how to summon presence, frame an intention, focus attention, what it means to be in the create-state, how to practice, explore and experiment, how to lighten up, let go and leap in with the supports we need to take risks from a place of safety in place, then we are setting ourselves up for creative failure.

And most of us don’t.

Most people haven’t been taught how the creative process works in their own lives. Worse, schools, workplaces, media, and other social structures highly suspicious of the creative have educated out of them what should be a natural process.

We are trained to approach tasks with only our conventional mind and that part of our mind does so love to complicate matters. For our creative mind, though, it’s simple. We can, of course, create what we want.

Once we know how.

The Law of Attraction

Anyone who is thinking or reading about conscious creation these days will soon come up against “the law of attraction”, a powerful idea that has been circulating for more than a century, rising and falling in public discourse and now, thanks to the Internet, reaching its largest audience ever.

The popularity of the Law of Attraction (hereafter referred to as LoA) today is thanks largely to the work of four people, three Americans and an Australian. Oh, and one spirit entity called Abraham. Yes, when you approach the LoA, you find yourself on the weird and wonderful fringes of the spiritual community.

The current wave of interest in LoA began in the 1990s, when Jerry and Esther Hicks started publishing books using that term. Jerry Hicks is a Californian who lived in such poverty as a child that his mother cut a neighbor’s fence so their cows would wander in and she could get milk for the children. By the time Jerry met Esther, a “girl from a small Rocky Mountain town”, he had built a multimillion-dollar business, for which he credits Napoleon Hill’s positive-thinking tract Think and Grow Rich.

The Hicks say “Abraham”, the name they give a variety of spirit entities “summoned by Jerry’s inquisitiveness and Esther’s receptivity”, speaks through Esther’s consciousness in order that they might understand LoA and pass on the news to the rest of the world.

For twenty years the couple has been traveling around America on a bus, and around the world on organized cruise trips, where people pay sizable sums to hear the word of Abraham. Whether you see Abraham as a slice of Esther’s consciousness, as actual spirit entities or as good commercial showmanship, there’s no denying the resonance of the message.

In the early 2000s, the Hicks and Abraham were growing their audience from the back of their bus, aided by the then-new technology of the Internet, when they connected with a young Australian TV producer, Rhonda Byrne, who was making a film called The Secret.

The concept of the film was that she would interview various authors and speakers who claimed physical and scientific evidence for LoA and its central premise: that thoughts become things.

Byrne boiled the LoA message down to three words: ask, believe, and receive.

• Ask God / the Universe / [insert your equivalent here] for whatever you want.

• Believe that you’ll get it.

• Receive it.

Unsurprisingly, people liked this idea, and the film was a huge success.

Esther and Jerry Hicks found themselves cut out of its profits. Some say because Byrne thought the spiritual community would be put off by Abraham, others because they asked for too much money to take part.

Then a fourth player (or fifth if we’re counting Abraham) entered the scene: a certain Ms. Winfrey, at that time the world’s most popular talk-show host, on first name terms to the whole world as Oprah.

Oprah brought The Secret and, in response to their complaints at being sidelined, the Hicks and Abraham to her massive audience. The Secret was now anything but, and the Hicks had attracted what they wanted: fame, fortune, and a growing fan base—plus hundreds of thousands of imitators all over the globe.

Since then, LoA has nearly become a productive book genre and made ideas that were once on the outside edge of New Thought almost mainstream.

The result is that LoA proponents have had more influence on ideas around conscious creation than anyone else. So before we get into looking at creative practice (and a mapping system that will support you through making what you want to make), let’s consider the claims of this wildly popular theory.

The Secret Doctrine

The concept of the law of attraction seems to have been first introduced to the reading public in the late nineteenth century, the brainchild of traveler, spiritualist, occultist, and founder of the Theosophy movement, Madame Helena Blavatsky.

Madame Blavatsky was a larger-than-life character well known to the spiritual and creative communities of her day. She plays a cameo part in my literary-historical novel Her Secret Rose, about the Irish poet and occultist WB Yeats.

Like most gurus, Blavatsky was a controversial figure. To her champions she was an enlightened inspiration; to her critics, a charlatan and fraud. What is undisputed is that she was a whizz at PR. According to her bio, as a young woman she was given “secret lore” by “masters of the ancient wisdom”, who dispatched her to deepest Tibet to develop her psychic powers.

Out of this, she created a movement called Theosophy, a “synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy” which, she claimed—much as Rhonda Byrne was to claim more than a century later—was the secret at the heart of all the world’s religions.

Her opus, published in 1888, was called The Secret Doctrine, and Theosophy was her version of what later came to be called “the perennial philosophy”, served up with large helpings of mumbo-jumbo, arcane language, outlandish claims, much smoke, and multiple mirrors.

It is still practiced today and has influenced thinkers from Aldous Huxley and Krishnamurti, through the Beat poets, to the counterculture and hippie movements of the 1960s and the attendant yoga, meditation, and mindfulness movements.

LoA was taken up and popularized by one of the cofounders of the Theosophical Society, Irish lawyer and esotericist William Quan Judge, who attempted no new revelation of his own, but to illustrate in his own words Madame’s theosophical teachings and their ideal use. He wrote, in summation of his deepest belief:

All our troubles in life arise from ourselves, no matter how much they may seem to come from the outside; we are all parts of the one great whole, and if you try to center your mind upon that fact, and to remember that those things that seem to trouble you are really due to your own way of looking at the world and life, you will probably grow more contented in mind… It is your own mind you should watch, and not the circumstances in which you are placed.

Or as the writer Anais Nin put it a great deal more succinctly, “We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.”

Furthered by various New Thought writers, LoA went in and out of fashion throughout the twentieth century until 2006, when it was revived for a new generation by Rhonda Byrne, who used clever marketing methods and new technologies to publicize her film and the subsequent book and website, spreading New Thought sayings far and wide until they have become almost household slogans: thoughts become things; what you believe, you conceive; and, most controversially, like attracts like.

The Downsides of LoA

LoA has given rise to many gurus on the Internet, promising easy solutions to serious problems in breathy language. Here’s one, chosen at random from the first page of a Google search just now, fronted by a woman called Katherine Hurst and claiming a community of 2.3 million people in more than 100 countries.

Pulling us in with promises and a surfeit of exclamation marks, Katherine invites us to:

Activate the power of Intention! Experience your original state of limitless abundance you felt as a child! Believe deep in your heart you can have, do, and be anything you want in life! Envision yourself manifesting everything you ask for! And feel what it’s like to live on your terms! I want to give you the same opportunity I was given years ago, to open up and allow the Universe to provide everything you want, once and for all! Be our next success story!

All of which sits uneasily with the (almost invisible) small print at the bottom of the page:

In accordance with the latest FTC guidelines, we want to make it explicitly clear that the customer letters we have received are based on the unique experiences and circumstances of a few people only. We cannot promise that you will experience similar benefits from using our products. The generally expected performance of our products in regards to any specific disease has not been scientifically validated.

It’s easy to make fun of those who are drawn to LoA, as a magazine article written around the time of publication of The Secret does, concluding with a line of Einstein’s that purports to explain its popularity: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former”.

Yes, we can all be stupid, most especially when we are feeling desperate as so many of those who turn to LoA are, but the massive appeal of the theory is not so easily explained away.

And any creative entrepreneur will recognize many of the recommendations of LoA as being very similar to creative principles: setting clear intentions and aligning thoughts, speech, and actions to those intentions; accentuating the positive; applying focus and creative visualization; trusting in inspiration and the creative process.

But from the perspective of conscious creation, LoA teachings fail on four fronts.

1. LoA Presents Wanting As Lack

Many of the people who are involved in “teaching” LoA position it as the answer to all your problems: If only you had the million dollars/dream partner/desired work/, everything would be perfect.

It’s known as “if-only syndrome”. Your desire is presented back to you as a lack or a problem, attenuating the sense of incompleteness that is a universal trait of the conventional mind in material-mode.

Wanting something is not a problem, unless you frame it that way. It’s a universal, necessary, process. A human given. We’ll always be wanting, as long as we live. Wanting what we want, fulfilling (or dropping) that want, wanting something new: that’s how life rolls.

That’s what makes us what we are, gives us the life we have.

Our wants are as individual and as necessary to us as our face or body. Wanting is the spark that fires conscious creation, whether it’s making your next meal, or your next million.

Just imagine, for a second, a world that did actually run on ask, believe, receive. How boring would that be?

2. LoA Leaves out Five Stages of the Process

The creative process has seven stages, divided into three phases, but LoA centers only on the first two stages: the intention and incubation stages of the vision phase.

Engaging with those two stages is still quite powerful, more creative work than many people otherwise experience in our materialist society. This, not human stupidity, is one of the main reasons why LoA has such widespread appeal. It’s the first experience most people have of tapping into the vast reservoir of their own creative power. And it feels good.

Just those two stages of the process taken together can be powerful stuff, enough to see some creative success. They are certainly enough to break the grip of conceptual thought, which is always a liberating and enjoyable experience, mentally and emotionally.

Once that sense of freedom and relief kicks in, stages three to seven can sometimes happen at the subconscious level, seemingly of its own accord, with so little effort we may not even know we’ve been through them.

If it’s a large project or intention, that’s not likely. We can write a poem at a sitting and not know that we’ve been through the seven stages above, but that will happen only rarely with a novel. We can create a family dinner without getting too conscious of the process, but if we wanted to organize a large banquet, understanding the stages can really help. We might be able to bring in a few hundred dollars unconsciously, but not a million. Even a lottery winner will have gone through later stages of the process. A ticket has to be bought. Numbers have to be chosen.

By giving people less than one third of the creative process to work with, LoA can create more blocks and frustrations than flow.

3. LoA Tries to Think Its Way out of Thought

The American writer Audre Lorde once wrote: “The master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house”. What this means in relation to conscious creation is that we cannot think our way out of a problem created by thought.

Using affirmations and bold statements without any supporting creative practices, LoA tries to get material-mind to bring about what only creative-mind can deliver.

LoA has many of its followers going around locked into an internal dialogue that goes something like this:

“I don’t have enough money/love/friends [insert lack/want here]”.

“No, no, I can’t think that or else I will create that situation. I do. I do have enough money/love/friends/whatever. Money/ love/friends/whatever are already mine”.

“But… I don’t really have enough money/love/friends [insert lack/want here]”.

And so it goes, “I have enough, I have enough”, repeated compulsively while trying to ignore the persistent denial bubbling up in response: “I don’t really believe that. I don’t really have enough”, which is then followed by more denial for denying it…

This can lead people into a really painful creative cul-de-sac.

Adding more thoughts, no matter how “positive”, is a poor way to solve a problem that has been generated by thinking itself. We need a deeper understanding of the process.

4. LoA Encourages Passivity

“Whatever you want will arrive”, says LoA, “if you just imagine it fully enough. You don’t have to do anything”.

Not only does this imply that people who have “bad” things in their lives have attracted them in by thinking “bad” thoughts, it also fosters the Cinderella complex, a widespread delusion that works against autonomy.

Prince Charming—in the form of a new partner, a new job, a new house—will arrive, fulfill all our dreams, and kiss away all the bad stuff.

Supposing that were true, and we were able to conjure up whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. What would we then do with our lives? The very point of life is to be creating, to experience the growth and evolution of the process, the actions it induces, the presence it generates, the practices it prompts, the connection with self and others that it demands.

What we want to create changes as our life unfolds, but the creative process is timeless, unchanging, enriching, and rewarding; is always available to us right here and now and is its own reward.

Next time we’ll look more closely.