‘Good God!’ said Powerscourt. ‘So we were right. They are there.’
‘How did they look, Johnny?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Did they seem to have been maltreated in any way? Did they look pale?’
‘They looked fine to me,’ said Johnny. ‘They were laughing with their young guard at one point as a matter of fact.’
‘Were they now,’ said Powerscourt, remembering somebody in South Africa telling him how captives often grew close to their captors. Maybe this happened in Butler Lodge too. Maybe the ladies were just looking after their own interests by charming the young men.
There was another arrival at their table. The Major was introduced to Lady Lucy and gazed at the Pomerol in astonishment. ‘Good God! Did you bring that stuff with you, Johnny?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Johnny cheerfully, ‘there’s a heap of it here in the cellars. It’s in pretty good shape. You’d better try some.’
‘Now then, Lady Powerscourt, Powerscourt, Johnny,’ the Major was making his report, ‘I bring news from the front. I stayed at my post rather longer than I intended, I must confess. Thought I might catch a sight of some of the damn fish the lodge was built for but no luck. Wrong time of year. My chaps went through their full routine of crawling about on their bellies, shinning up trees without making a noise, the usual tricks. They report a total bag of five or maybe six, all aged about twenty or so, all carrying out various tasks inside the house. My most expert wallah, fellow by the name of Healey, claimed he heard one of the villains complaining he’d been made to do the cooking three days in a row. Didn’t hear the reply.’
Powerscourt told the Major about the sighting of the two women on the lawn.
‘Fillies in the paddock, eh? That’s damned good work. Now then, Powerscourt, your show here, of course, do you have a plan for tomorrow?’
Powerscourt did indeed have a plan taking shape in his mind for tomorrow but he was not going to mention it at this point or in this company. ‘Yes and no,’ he said, ‘Sorry for such an Irish reply. Do you have any suggestions, Major?’
‘Well,’ said the Major, rubbing his hand together, ‘I can’t see a way round the women and that’s a fact. My natural instinct, as taught by those clever chappies in the Staff College, would be to infiltrate the place. Trooper at every window, rifles drawn, pack of seven or eight lined up at the front door. Stand and deliver. Under normal circumstances that should loosen their bowels all right, the damned Paddies, all come out with their hands up demanding a glass of Guinness, that sort of thing. But it wouldn’t work with the fillies inside unable to flee the coop.’
‘Do you think they’ll try to make a run for it, Francis, now they know we’re here?’
‘Would you, Johnny?’ Powerscourt replied.
‘I think I would,’ said Johnny, emptying another glass of rich red wine. ‘The longer they stay, the more heavily the odds are stacked against them.’
‘I’m not sure,’ said the Major, screwing an elaborate monocle into his right eye for a closer inspection of the wine bottle’s label, ‘that it makes any difference if you have fifty fellows camped outside their front door or five hundred. As long as they have the fillies they hold the ace of trumps.’
‘I wonder if they’re waiting for something,’ said Powerscourt, ‘the day of the deadline perhaps. I forgot to tell you, I haven’t been able to find a single person here who speaks Irish and could translate that message we intercepted. There’s a bloody menu in Irish, for God’s sake, at least I presume it’s Irish. Hardly likely to be written in Bulgarian out here. There’s a helpful page written in what I presume is Irish with drawings of boats and horses which I imagine is some sort of guide to the local attractions, waterborne excursions up Killary Harbour, best places to hide a couple of Protestant women, that sort of thing, but not a soul will admit to being able to translate a few sentences.’
‘I think we should put a guard on the place tonight, Powerscourt,’ said the Major, eager for action. ‘They might well try to make a run for it. Fox’s last stand, what?’
‘Please do that, try to keep the villains awake, might dull their wits tomorrow,’ said Powerscourt, and the Major marched off.
‘Do you think they know they’ve had it, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘that the game is up?’
‘I don’t think that’s how they see it,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘not yet at any rate. If Ormonde gives in to the blackmail tomorrow, then they’ve won. They leave the ladies behind and try to escape. In one sense, you see, our arrival has made the ladies’ position much safer, though I don’t know if they have worked that out yet. If they had killed them before we came and made good their escape, how could we have linked these young men to the deaths? Very difficult, if not impossible. But now they know they’re surrounded. If they kill the ladies they’ll be caught. Then they’ll hang. Even a Mayo jury would have to convict them. It’d be committing suicide. You’re not going to advance the sacred cause of Irish freedom by murdering a couple of harmless Protestant women. So why kill them? I can’t see any advantage at all, only the gallows waiting for you after a short spell in Castlebar Jail.’
‘Would you like to put that to the test by trying to storm the place tomorrow?’ Lady Lucy sounded very serious.
‘I would not,’ replied her husband.
‘I’m just going to sort something out in our room, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘and maybe I should dress for dinner. I’m sure they always do here in Leenane. I’ll see you both in a little while.’
Powerscourt took his friend out into the little garden that looked over the water. A stone nymph was blowing water on to the roses. A couple of fishing boats were coming in to land at the little jetty a hundred yards to their left. Powerscourt leaned over the wall and told Johnny of his plan. Johnny looked at him closely and took a great gulp of his Pomerol. ‘If I’d known you were going to say something like that, Francis, I’d have brought the whole bloody bottle with me.’ Johnny looked out towards the mountains, brilliant with sunlight. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘of course I’ll do it. Wouldn’t do it for anybody else, mind you. Have you told Lady Lucy?’
‘I’m not going to tell her this evening. It can wait until the morning.’
‘One other thing, Francis,’ said Johnny, looking at the tiny harbour, ‘don’t you think our friend the Major should mount a guard here too? The buggers could escape in a boat and nobody would know where they’d gone.’
After dinner that evening Powerscourt outlined part of his plan. ‘First thing in the morning, Major,’ he began, ‘could you send a couple of chaps up to the front door with a white flag. They’re to deliver this letter and wait for the reply.’
Lady Lucy was looking anxious. ‘And what does the letter say, Francis?’
Powerscourt pulled a sheet of the hotel’s finest notepaper from his pocket. ‘It says,’ he began to read, ‘“Lord Francis Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald propose to call on your leaders at eleven o’clock this morning. They will not be armed. They suggest that a truce should be in operation from the receipt of this letter until the end of the meeting. Please give your reply to the man who brought this letter. Yours, etc, Powerscourt.”’
‘Spot of chinwag never did any harm in these circumstances,’ said the Major. ‘Mind you, the way these Paddies talk you could be in there till dinner time at the earliest.’
‘Expect we’ll be lectured about our desertion of the Irish cause for the King’s shilling,’ said Johnny gloomily. ‘There’s no fanatic as fanatical as a young fanatic, especially if they’ve been educated by the bloody Christian Brothers.’
‘And what are you going to say to them, Francis?’ Lady Lucy sensed there was something her husband was not telling her.
‘I’m going to try to point out to them,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that their position is hopeless. They’re outnumbered and outgunned for a start. In any fight they’re going to lose. I don’t think I’ll put it quite like this, but they have a choice between a bullet at Butler Lodge and the ro
pe on the gallows. If they give themselves up peacefully, we will ensure that the authorities treat their cases with sympathy.’
‘I don’t think Dennis Ormonde would see it in quite those terms, Francis,’ said Johnny. ‘If he had his way, they’d be stripped and tied to those punishment triangles at the Octagon in Westport and flogged until their blood was running down the street.’
‘Well, he’s not here,’ said Powerscourt realistically. ‘We are.’
‘I’ve been thinking about the problem with the fillies,’ said the Major, looking suspiciously at a large glass of Irish whiskey. ‘Do you think we could mount a raid in the night? Get a couple of chaps inside, shouldn’t be difficult, find the ladies, whisk them out. Blast the rest of them to hell first thing in the morning.’
‘It’s worth considering,’ Powerscourt replied diplomatically. ‘Once we know the results of the meeting we will have to review all the options left. That would certainly be one of them.’
There was a full moon shining over Killary Harbour and the little garden of the hotel. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were leaning on the wall, looking at the water, dark grey, almost black. A couple of fishing boats were pulled up on the shingle near the quay. The mountains to their right were dark and menacing. Somewhere up there, Powerscourt said to himself, the two ladies were spending another night in dangerous captivity. Did they know there was a rescue mission just five short miles away, eager to devise a plan that would restore their liberty?
‘How do you think they’ll be bearing up, Mrs Ormonde and her sister, Lucy?’
‘I expect they’ll be managing, anybody who can cope with Dennis Ormonde should be well equipped to handle anything.’
Powerscourt laughed.
‘I’m more worried about you, to be honest, Francis,’ Lady Lucy went on.
‘Do you think you’ll be all right, going to confer with these people?’
‘I’m sure I’ve talked to worse in my time,’ said her husband, wondering if now was the moment to give her the whole picture. He decided against it. As he fell asleep that night, realizing that the deadline, so long awaited, was about to arrive, he wondered if this was the last night he would ever spend with Lucy sleeping by his side.
14
Lord Francis Powerscourt delayed his breakfast as long as he could. He spent a great deal of time shaving. He pottered about in the bedroom for so long that Lady Lucy was quite stern with him, saying he should come along to breakfast now and stop daydreaming like one of the children. The Major interrupted them during the kippers. ‘Had to borrow a hotel sheet for the flag of truce, Powerscourt. Told the hotel fellow we’d make it up to him. Expect we’ll be charged some giant bill in recompense. My chaps are just about to totter off now. Back soon, I hope. Do you think these peasant people will recognize a flag of truce? Just thought I’d ask. Tough luck on my men if they don’t. Never mind. Tally ho!’ With that, Arbuthnot-Leigh strode off to the stables to supervise the troopers’ departure. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy had moved on to the toast and marmalade now. Suddenly Powerscourt could bear the deception no longer.
‘Lucy, my love, there’s something I’ve got to tell you. I meant to tell you yesterday but my courage failed me.’
As he told her Powerscourt thought he could see the tears forming in her eyes, then she fought them back. Her family, the Hamiltons, he remembered, had been soldiers for generations. Her first husband had been a soldier, lost with Gordon at Khartoum. Now, he knew, she was thinking about losing another one. ‘I’ll be perfectly safe,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It may never happen. I’ll come back. I promise you.’
He took her hands in his. She was sobbing now. ‘Just let me go to our room alone for a few minutes, Francis. I’ll be back. Just a few minutes.’
She took the key from the table and went off. Powerscourt wondered, not for the first time, if he was doing the right thing. Johnny Fitzgerald appeared, took one look at his friend and fled. The waiters began clearing the breakfast things away. Powerscourt looked at his watch. The two troopers should be at the house by now. He wondered if the two ladies would be able to watch them come, messengers from another world, a world they had left behind.
Lady Lucy came back, looking more cheerful. Powerscourt marvelled at her courage. It was nearly half past nine.
‘Powerscourt, Lady Powerscourt!’ The Major was back, slightly out of breath. ‘Good news. Our lads are back. The meeting is on for eleven o’clock.’
‘What happened exactly?’ said Powerscourt.
‘Might have been an exchange of invitations to afternoon tea in Tunbridge Wells by the sound of it,’ said the Major cheerfully. ‘My chaps ride up, waving white flags vigorously as if they had just relieved Mafeking. Redheaded Paddy answers the doorbell. Disappears off to find Head Man Paddy or maybe Head Boy Paddy – why are they all so bloody young, for Christ’s sake – and comes back inside a minute. “That’s fine,” he says. “Truce. Ceasefire.” Then he closes the door. That’s it.’
‘Good,’ said Powerscourt, part of whose brain had been hoping the meeting would be rejected. He had told the army man the details of his plan the night before. ‘If, for whatever reason,’ he had said finally, ‘I don’t come out and the kidnappers do, follow them, follow them all the way home or wherever they are going to. Unobtrusively, of course, but all the way.’
‘Of course,’ the Major had replied. ‘Let’s pray it doesn’t come to that.’
‘Look, Lucy,’ Powerscourt turned to his wife, ‘there’s nearly an hour before I have to go. Why don’t we take the hotel boat out on the water? It’s a lovely morning.’
Five minutes later Powerscourt was stroking the little boat up the dark waters of Killary Harbour. Lady Lucy was wearing an enormous hat to shade her from the sun. She thought you could hide all sorts of things under a wide brim. ‘Is Butler Lodge up there, Francis?’ she said, pointing towards the mountains on the right.
‘It is, my love,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it’s on the far side of that mountain with an unpronounceable name, Mweelrea I think it is. It’s got its own lake in the front and a river that’s supposed to be full of fish.’
‘Is it pretty?’ said Lady Lucy. Powerscourt knew she was trying to form a picture in her mind of the site where she might lose another husband, another one lost not to the fogs of war but in the mists of civil strife.
‘I can’t say that I have been inspecting it with the eyes of a tourist,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but it would be very beautiful if it was being used properly.’
Lady Lucy fell silent. A couple of fishermen shouted good morning at them from a hundred yards away. A herd of cows was making a leisurely progress towards Leenane, mooing loudly as they went. Powerscourt turned the boat round and began the return journey towards the hotel.
‘Francis,’ she said at last, ‘you will be careful, won’t you. You see, I’ve just worked it out, we’ve been married for thirteen years now, it’s scarcely credible, is it, and I love you as much now as I did on the day I married you. More even. I couldn’t bear it to end. Not here. Not now. Not like this. I want to be with you till the end, Francis, as I hope you’ll be there for me. Please remember that I love you so much. Take care. Take very great care. I shall be thinking of you and praying for you every moment of every day until you come back.’ She held his hand and kissed it. ‘Now, I won’t say any more. Semper Fidelis, Francis.’
Semper Fidelis, forever faithful, was a sort of motto, or talisman, between the two of them. It had first been mentioned to Powerscourt by a young man who killed himself in an earlier investigation when he first met Lady Lucy. It had followed them through their lives ever since, a punctuation point on their journey through love and time.
‘Semper Fidelis, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt gravely. Out there on the still waters of Killary Harbour, under the wide Connemara sky, he wished he did not have to continue his investigation, to embark on his hazardous mission to Butler Lodge. He wanted to be somewhere else, to stay with Lucy and row out to the mouth of the great fjor
d. Then he thought of the Ormonde family, of husbands whose wives had been abducted, of the Butlers and the Moores whose very identity was under threat from forces they neither knew nor understood. He kissed Lady Lucy after he handed her out of the boat and set out to prepare for his ordeal.
Half an hour later he and Johnny Fitzgerald were standing by the front door of Butler Lodge. They knew that the hills around the house concealed the Major’s troops, rifles at the ready in case things went wrong.
‘Your round or mine, Francis?’ said Johnny, looking at the bell.
‘Mine, I think,’ said Powerscourt and pushed it firmly. A clear peal could be heard inside. Powerscourt wondered if the two ladies had heard it. They heard footsteps. The door opened to reveal the redhead who had answered it earlier that day. Perhaps he was acting as butler for the duration.
‘Come in, please,’ said the young man politely. ‘Would you wait here for a moment now?’
Powerscourt looked around the hall. The floor was marble, you could find marble everywhere in Connemara, he remembered. A couple of hurling sticks were resting in an umbrella stand. There was a table to the left of the door. A pair of fish in glass cases looked across at them from the opposite wall. Powerscourt suddenly remembered the fascination of stuffed creatures for the Anglo-Irish. The birds of the air and the beasts of the field were all fair game for the taxidermists, owls and badgers, voles and squirrels, pike and salmon and trout, otters and owls, bream and perch, all ended up stuck on the walls of the Anglo-Irish in their glass coffins. Powerscourt had been to houses in his youth where they were so numerous that he would not have been surprised to see a stuffed human staring out at him from hall or passageway. Privately he suspected that the gentry identified with these dead creatures. Were they not preserved too, pickled in their past and their history until they had little relevance to the modern world?
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