Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [91]
Maud looked at him and smiled strangely.
“Don’t worry, Willie. I’m not afraid. Haven’t I told you before that I am never afraid?”
She rose, her trembling completely gone, and even the sorrow that had weighted her before her arrival diminished. She looked stronger, and, in that strength, more distant. Willie felt a twinge of longing for the weaker Maud, who had needed his comfort, but he put the feeling from him as selfish.
“I must be going now,”Maud said.“Where is my wrap?”
Despite his protestations that they must further analyze her experience, Maud departed soon after, promising to let him call on her the next day. She would not allow him to see her to the street, saying she was perfectly capable of finding a cab.
Willie went to the window to watch her depart. As he pulled back the curtain, he found a face was looking at him from the glass. The cold shock sent him reeling back a pace, the curtain falling limp from his hand, but the face and the woman to whom it belonged remained standing before him.
She resembled Maud and yet was not precisely the same. A veil of some gauzy stuff was drawn across the lower half of her face. He could see her lips, full and beautifully shaped,moving behind it.
“You have never really believed,”said the Lady in Grey, and her voice was Maud’s, underlaid with a mocking note he had before heard only in nightmare. “If you had believed, you would never have summoned me to face her. I shall give you something to remember me by—and to remind you of the dangers of parting the veil.”
Bending slightly, the Lady in Grey extended one hand toward Willie’s groin. The cold caress of her fingers slipped through the fabric and touched him intimately, even as he had fantasized in shameful dreams that Maud would touch him. Cold emanated from those elegant fingers, spreading through his masculine parts and lingering long after the Lady in Grey had given him a saucy smile and vanished.
MAUD
Initially,Maud was pleased to have spoken with her other self. Aware that Tommy’s cautions about fear seemed to have been the genesis of the Lady’s independence, Maud took another of his teachings as her guide when dealing with the Lady in Grey.
“Will is a strange, incalculable force,”sh e remembered Tommy saying. “It is so powerful that if, as a boy, I had willed to be the Pope of Rome, I would have been the Pope.”
But Tommy had not possessed a fixed will, and so had achieved little. Maud was determined not to make the same mistake. Her will would be strong enough to make the Lady in Grey her agent.
Maud took to sending the Lady in Grey to infiltrate the dreams of her adversaries and through the Lady’s agency persuading the reluctant ones to join Maud’s cause. In this way,Maud reasoned, the Lady would do good, and so would not be the evil influence Willie feared.
The Lady in Grey seemed pleased by these missions, going forth in whatever guise would best reach her target’s subconscious self: sometimes as Maud herself, sometimes as the devious and lovely Queen Maeve, sometimes armed and armored as the Irish Joan of Arc. Maud’s influence grew. Despite the loss of Parnell, the cause of Irish Independence grew stronger.
Yet there were difficulties between Maud and the Lady as well. For one, though Maud would fain have let the Lady in Grey resume haunting her only with an occasional vision, Willie’s parting of the veil seemed to have given the Lady more freedom to appear at her own impulse. Her appearances grew more frequent the more Maud relied on her services.
The Lady in Grey only appeared in certain circumstances, most often when someone who was psychically sensitive was present. After some embarrassing errors, Maud realized that no one but herself could see the Lady. Only the most sensitive seemed even to know she was there.
Soon after the Lady in Grey first appeared,Willie brought Maud to meet the head of the Order of the Golden Dawn. Willie