The God of the Labyrinth

  I rang Diana to tell her I had arrived safely; as I hung up, a call came through from Clive Bates. I had written to tell him I would be at the Shelbourne. I asked him if he would like to join me for dinner. He accepted, and suggested that I go to have a drink with him first. He was in Ranelagh Road, opposite the monastery, and I walked over there at about five o’clock. He was a plumpish young man with a drawling Oxford voice. His flat was comfortable, and the drink cupboard well stocked. There were a great many books, some of them on the theatre and ballet. Clive Bates obviously had a private income or a good job, or both. Everything about his room indicated that he was a man who was fond of his comforts. He had great charm and ease of manner; but something about his mouth suggested that he might become very sulky or bad-tempered if he failed to get his own way.

  While we drank vodka martinis, the conversation was general; then it turned to my books, and to various writers we had both met. He had worked in the Foreign Office for a while—after Eton and Balliol—and had met a great many literary and theatrical figures in London. For my own part, I always avoid other writers; talking shop bores me, and there are few whose work I really admire. So the conversation soon began to bore me. After half an hour or so, I tried tactfully to direct it into other channels. I asked after the health of his grandfather.

  ‘Oh yes. The old boy wants to see you. I’ve been telling him about your work.’ He looked at his watch. ‘He’s usually alone at about this time. Would you like to drop over before we eat?’ I said yes, trying not to sound as eager as I felt.

  We drove over to Baggot Street, although it was close enough. Clive Bates had a Porsche that was so low I had a feeling that my buttocks were within an inch of the road. As we got in, Bates said:

  ‘Of course, you’re doing all this for money?’

  For a moment I failed to understand him, and looked blank; he said:

  ‘This Donelly chappie. I mean, he’s pretty second rate, isn’t he? I was looking at his book on deflowering virgins the other day. It’s pretty crude stuff.’

  I started to say that I thought the book a forgery, and then, for some reason, held my peace. Instead, I explained about Fleisher and his commission.

  We parked in Baggot Street. Clive Bates said casually:

  ‘By the way, have you ever heard of the Sect of the Phoenix?’

  I stared at him. And then a peculiar thing happened. Suddenly, I was Esmond again, or rather, Esmond was looking out of my eyes. I said:

  ‘Vaguely. Wasn’t it some kind of magical cult?’

  ‘More or less. Donelly was a member.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s in my grandfather’s papers. He’s always been interested in this Sect of the Phoenix. He heard about it from a magician called Macgregor Mathers. You may have come across him?’

  ‘Of course. I’ve got his translation of the Zohar.’

  There was no time for more conversation; we were ringing on a doorbell, and a few moments later a young nurse opened the door. Bates called her ‘My dear Betty’, and pinched her behind. She seemed embarrassed by my presence. We went up to a first-floor bedroom. It was a dark place, although it was still light enough outside; the curtains were half drawn, and a dim bulb burned over the bed.

  Isaac Jenkinson Bates was as frail as I had expected from his grandson’s description: a little, bald-headed old man with a parchment complexion. When he raised his hands from the counterpane to shake hands with me, they trembled convulsively, and he quickly laid them flat on the bed again. He asked us if we would like a drink. We both refused, but he insisted. ‘I know you young people like a drink at about this time.’ He told the nurse to pour us sherry. I accepted it out of politeness, but it was awful stuff. The old man talked for a few minutes on the history of sherry, and his own theory of why it was once called sack—because the grapes were strained through sacks. Then, halfway through a sentence, he changed the subject to the Ireland’s Eye murder case. I had read up all I could find on it before I left home, but it proved to be unnecessary; he talked in a steady flow for another ten minutes or so.

  When he paused for a moment, Clive Bates said:

  ‘Mr Sorme had heard of the Sect of the Phoenix.’

  ‘Oh yes; well, of course, Donelly was a member of that, and a most disgusting and unpleasant sort of thing it was too. Yes, of course, you know it sprang from a belief that if a couple were copulating, they couldn’t catch a disease. So at the time of the Black Death it became an excuse for every kind of licence. By Donelly’s time it was just a kind of semi-magical sect of ruffians. Do you know de Sade’s Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom? I’m pretty certain that de Sade was satirising the Sect of the Phoenix in that—you know, the four filthy old rakes who set up a kind of sexual menagerie in a country house. Old Tom Wise always thought that that was why de Sade spent most of his life in gaol. He knew too much about them.’

  Clive Bates interposed: ‘Thomas J. Wise. The literary forger, you know.’

  ‘Well, he may or may not have been that. They say he was, but I’m not so sure. But he was always a damned good friend to me. And as I say, he was absolutely convinced that these Phoenix people were after de Sade . . .’

  Clive winked at me.

  ‘But why should they be after him if he was as bad as they were?’

  ‘He wasn’t. No. He was satirising them, you see.’

  I should explain that the old man’s explanations were not as clear as I have made them here. His conversation was distinctly hard to follow, and punctuated with odd rumbles and snorts. I did not try to contradict his amazing statement about de Sade, but my hope of getting any useful information sank lower. I asked him how he had become interested in the Sect of the Phoenix.

  ‘Saw a copy of that rare pamphlet. That was how I got to know Wise, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Which pamphlet, sir?’

  ‘Oh, the famous one . . . Henry Martell and George Smithson. Clive, look in the top drawer over there, will you?’

  The pamphlet was not in the top drawer; but after ten minutes—during which Bates muttered dark accusations against the world in general, and his nurse in particular—it was found in another cupboard. I snatched at it eagerly. It had been placed in red morocco folders, and was in a rather battered condition. AN EXPOSURE OF THE EVIL CONSPIRACY KNOWN AS THE SOCIETY OF THE PHOENIX, by Henry Martell, M.A., and George Smithson, D.D. Printed for the authors by G. Robinson, the Old Bankside, 1793. Clive was asking, in his smoothest and most insinuating tone:

  ‘I don’t understand why you think it genuine when it came from a man like Wise.’

  The old man rose to the bait and became very snappy.

  ‘I’ll thank you not to speak like that about Wise. He was no more a forger than I am. He was trying to defend the memory of his friend Henry Buxton Forman.’

  I said:

  ‘In any case, surely the actual text of the forgeries was always genuine? It was only a matter of spurious dating on pamphlets?’

  ‘Quite’, said the old man, and then, to Clive: ‘You see, he knows more about it than you do!’

  I left them to argue, and read avidly. The whole pamphlet took a high moral tone, and accused the Sect of the Phoenix of being the cause of the downfall of Louis XIV. Since it will be printed complete in the appendix of the Donelly Memoirs, I shall not quote it at length here. If this pamphlet was old Bates’s chief source of information on the brotherhood, I could see why he regarded it so unfavourably. I found myself reminded of certain pamphlets and articles published about Rasputin shortly after his murder in 1917—incredible, vague accusations of mon­strous conspiracies, wholesale rape and abduction, disgusting ceremonies. According to the authors, it was primarily a magical organisation. The passage which aroused most discussion—after my article about it in the Atlantic Monthly—was the one describ­ing the way in which the Grand Master or any of his selected
adepts could enslave girls by collecting three of their ‘bloddied clouts’ after their menstrual period, cutting a hole in the middle of any stain shaped roughly like the female genitals, and wearing this on the penis for a period of seven days and nights. At the end of this period, the virgin will be impelled to answer the summons of the Grand Master to yield him her maidenhead, and thereafter may be possessed by him at any time, even though they are a thousand miles apart. There follows the strange story of Adele Crispin, who was possessed by the Grand Master on her wedding night, at the same time that her husband was possessing her, and whose child had the features of the Grand Master—black hair, dark skin, and so on. (The Grand Master at the time was the Persian Abdallah Yahya, who boasted that he had left his seed in the womb of every pretty woman in Roman high society. The authors cite this as an example of monstrous de­pravity rather than as imaginative mendacity.) Abdallah Yahya was murdered and dismembered in 1791 by Hendrik van Griss, the monstrous Dutchman. Van Griss is supposed to have weighed over 300 pounds (150 kilos), and to have frequently rendered his victims unconscious, or even killed them, by simply allowing his weight to fall on them. Van Griss was Grand Master for only two years, during which time he was infected with syphilis by the Rumanian courtesan Maria Creanga, which is said to have been of such a deadly nature that by 1794 Van Griss had become a putrefying, featureless mountain of flesh. In the Journal of Psychoanalysis for July 1969, Professor Aram Roth interpreted the whole story in Freudian terms—beginning with the fetichistic activities with ‘bloddied clouts’—and dismissed it as Gothic fantasy. In the September issue, Miss Marganita Bondeson points out that there was no need for invention, since most of the rituals described can be found in Arabic and Persian grimoires of the eighteenth century, and pointing out that Restif de la Bretonne has described someone who sounds very like van Griss (under the name Cubières-Palmézaux) in his Nuits de Paris of 1788, describing him as ‘the legendary pervert’. It was I who drew her attention to the Restif passage.

  ‘They were criminals, these people,’ the old man said. ‘Criminal degenerates. You saw who introduced the sect to France?’

  I had indeed. The authors of the pamphlet stated that Gilles de Rais had become a member of the sect in his seventeenth year (1421), initiated by a defrocked priest. Martell and Smith­son were in agreement with St Nilus Sorsky that the sect was nothing more than a development of the doctrines of the Brethren of the Free Spirit. Having rejected all moral law, they aimed at the fullest expression of the ‘organs of pleasure’. In its earliest days, say the authors, members of the sect dressed as monks, and specialised in rape and necrophily. They would offer to keep vigil over dead bodies of young girls—and boys—and wait until everyone was asleep before ravishing the corpse. The one thing to be said in their favour, apparently, was that they tried to avoid doing actual physical damage to their victims. A young milkmaid who was raped by two of them was left tied and gagged under a heap of leaves, to be found two days later. Another was told that she would find herself pregnant with a monster if she dared to breathe a word, and duly kept the secret until her next men­strual period reassured her. ‘Since it was their rule never to kill the victim to avoid later recognition, they were obliged to become masters of disguise, and many of them carried boxes of different coloured dyes that they might change the colour of their habits at will.’ Gilles de Rais was their first rich convert, having been received into the sect by one Gilles de Sillé. The talk of alchemy at his trial was a blind alley, according to the pamphlet. The mass murder of children was simply an expression of the ‘diabolical licentiousness’ advocated by the Sect of the Phoenix.

  Now if Rais was a member of the Sect of the Phoenix, Martell and Smithson would have established their case that it was an evil and horrific organisation. But in fact they offer no evidence for their assertion. I felt inclined to point this out to the old man, but it was difficult to interrupt the meandering flood of reminiscence. I finally managed to ask him if he had anything more on the Sect of the Phoenix.

  ‘Yes. I’ve a most interesting letter from Tom Wise. I corres­­ponded with him about it—that would be in about 1905. Clive, look in that top drawer again.’

  Clive pulled a face, but obediently rummaged among piles of old papers. The nurse came in with a bowl of steaming, aromatic liquid, which she placed in a metal frame on the bed. Old Bates then covered his head with a kind of plastic bag, and breathed in the fumes. I presume it was some cure for asthma. I offered to help Clive Bates search for the papers. He said: ‘Oh, I expect you’ll find some interesting stuff. . .’, and picked up the pamphlet I had been reading. I glanced through a pile of old letters, but since I had no idea of what I was supposed to be looking for, I felt the whole exercise was futile. I pulled out a black folder from the bottom of the drawer, and glanced into it. What I saw made me look quickly towards the old man, then at his grandson. Neither of them was paying any attention to me. The folder contained a dozen or so pages of manuscript, and I recognised the handwriting. It was James Boswell’s. The first sheet was headed ‘Saturday 1st February’, and someone had inserted the date 1766 in pencil. Again I glanced at Clive. He was completely absorbed in the pamphlet. The old man was breathing wheezily and complaining to the nurse, who was rearranging the bed. I drew up my chair to the drawer, and settled down to reading the manuscript. At one point, Clive Bates got up and glanced over my shoulder. I wondered if he would ask me what the devil I was doing; but he went and sat down again, and continued reading.

  The account described Boswell leaving Paris in the company of Thérèse le Vasseur, Rousseau’s mistress (whom Boswell had described in an earlier entry—which I discovered later—as ‘a little, lively neat French girl’); the pair were on their way to England, travelling together for convenience. On the second night, they decided to share a bed at the inn. Boswell, to his deep chagrin, failed to perform his manly duties, and he burst into tears, ‘whose stains’, he noted, ‘can be observed on the previous page’. Thérèse restored his confidence the following night by performing for him the service that Minou did for both her lovers—kneeling in front of him and caressing him with her mouth. ‘The sight of her crouched in this humble position made me feel pity, which did so greatly restore my vigour that I laid her down on the carpet there and then, and came at her like a wild bull. I think she was well satisfied by my size, for she gave a gasp of surprise, and then let out her breath in a sigh.’ I am quoting from the few sentences that I managed to scrawl in pencil on a scratch pad that I had in my pocket. I knew I was looking at the Boswell manuscript that Isaac Jenkinson Bates had somehow extracted from Malahide. Quite obviously, he had no right to have it. So I knew the chances of his allowing me to borrow it, or even copy it, were minimal.

  Clive Bates said: ‘Have you come to the bit about Donelly yet?’

  ‘No.’ I was startled, and glanced at the old man. His head was completely invisible, and I was certain he had not heard. Clive said:

  ‘Do read it. It’s terribly funny.’

  I muttered something, hoping that it would not dawn on old Bates to ask me what I was reading, or if I had found Wise’s letter. I skipped over two pages of Boswell apostrophising himself as ‘you’ and reflecting on his qualities of charm and moral seriousness. In the entry for Sunday, February 9, I found the name I was looking for. Boswell and Thérèse arrived at Calais in a rainstorm. They put up at a hostelry that he mentions simply as Mme Duchesne’s, where he and Thérèse took a single large room on the ground floor. Boswell changed his clothes and walked around the town. ‘Near the docks, someone clapped me upon the shoulder, and I turned to see Esmond Donelly, who had come there by the diligence from Dunquerque.’ They went back to Boswell’s lodging, where Donelly was able to procure a room. Apparently Boswell and Esmond had met in Dresden. They had ‘a collation and a flask of good wine’, and talked about Wilkes and Horace Walpole, whom they had both seen in Paris. Thérèse came in—Boswell was unaware that Esmond
had met her with Rousseau at Neuchâtel—and Boswell says: ‘I had to own I was chagrined at the cordiality of her greeting, and the manner in which she kept on repeating that this was a delightful surprise.’ They decided to eat dinner together, and Esmond took them to an eating house. ‘At supper, he talked a great deal of bawdy, and since Mademoiselle did not seem to be offended, I joined in, and felt my ill humour disappear.’ They returned to their lodgings, and Boswell said jokingly that he hoped Esmond would treat their meeting with discretion if he happened to see Rousseau in London. And then, with the in­credible frankness that is so typical of Boswell, he proceeded to tell Esmond of his failure with Thérèse, and of how he had been so alarmed on a later occasion that he drank a whole bottle of wine before going to bed with her. The conversation became more intimate. Thérèse talked about the clumsiness of the English in the art of lovemaking. Esmond thereupon shocked Boswell by offering to demonstrate his own mastery of the subject there and then. And then it struck him that if Esmond possessed Thérèse, he would have good reason for being discreet if he met Rousseau; so he expressed his approval of the idea. It was Thérèse’s turn to look shocked, and Esmond twitted her with accusations of prudery. At this, she decided that it would be pointless to conceal her inclination, and agreed to form her own estimate of Esmond’s prowess as a lover. ‘Come, sir,’ said Esmond to Boswell, ‘let us show her that the Celts are the life­blood of Europe.’ Thérèse giggled; Boswell was determined to show that he was as sophisticated as his young friend (Esmond was eight years his junior), and accompanied them into the bed­room.