Powerscourt paused and took a sip of champagne. His little audience was transfixed. Lady Lucy smiled at him from halfway down the table, Thomas Butler, 1726-1788, behind her head. ‘Now we come to the blackmail letters, or the absence of them. I must say that the denial of their existence for a long time caused me considerable problems. For I was sure there were blackmail letters. There had to be. The thieves didn’t want to sell the paintings. They obviously wanted to wound their victims, but surely there was more to it than that. I remember Richard Butler telling me once that he had sworn to his father to preserve all his inheritance and to pass it on to the next generation. The others may have made similar vows, I don’t know, it may be the custom in these families. Only Dennis Ormonde, in his fury, confirmed that there had been such a missive. His anger, incidentally, confirmed to me that the thieves had indeed chosen a powerful weapon in the paintings, guaranteed to destabilize their victims. Even then you all refused to tell me precisely what was in the blackmail letters. I presumed, wrongly, that it had to do with money, and that was a subject any Irish gentleman would be reluctant to discuss with his peers.’
Uncle Peter shuffled slowly into the back of the dining room. He was wearing a tattered blue coat and clutching a bottle of white wine. He nodded amiably to Powerscourt and sat down.
‘Now I would like to address one of the thorniest aspects of the matter,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘put simply, how many lots of thieves were there? One? Two? Three? Four? Eventually I came to the conclusion that there were two. The thefts from here and from Moore and Connolly were all the work of one lot. The proof is in the fact that Moore’s paintings were found in the Mulcahy outhouse. But who were the others? Mulcahy has a brother, one Declan Mulcahy, a solicitor in Swinford with branch offices in Castlebar and Ballinrobe. He specializes in land, you’ll be surprised to hear, and is a rising power in County Mayo. I think our Mulcahy mentioned his plan to his brother and they decided to try it on at Ormonde House, both with the theft and with the kidnap. It was Uncle Peter, oddly enough, who put me on to how the manpower was recruited. In his account of Parnell’s funeral he mentioned the honour guard of young men with hurling sticks from the Gaelic Athletic Association who guarded the coffin all the way through the streets of Dublin to the cemetery. Even then it was thought that they were linked to extreme elements of Irish Republicanism. There were a couple of hurling sticks in the front hall of Butler Lodge. The Archbishop of Tuam told me he was very worried about some of the younger priests and Christian Brothers because their politics are so extreme and they preach their message of violent opposition to English or Anglo-Irish rule to the young. Johnny Fitzgerald had a conversation in Westport with a defrocked Christian Brother who said you could use the young men of the Gaelic Athletic Association, the GAA, to take over Ireland. I believe the Swinford Mulcahy got in touch with these people, maybe through a priest or a Brother who coaches one of the football or hurling teams, and asked for volunteers to strike a blow in Ireland’s cause. Steal a few pictures, make off with a couple of women, that sort of thing. Those kidnappers who took and held the Ormonde ladies were fanatical nationalists to a man. They said we were traitors. I believe the kidnap, incidentally, was in part to do with the blackmail and in part a sort of revenge for the arrival of the Orangemen. The blackmail letters may have said that the women were next after the paintings, I don’t know.’
Outside the windows they could hear the shouts and cries of the children playing, the children who had been so well entertained until recently by Young James.
‘Now I come to the death of the young man whose body was found in the chapel at the summit of Croagh Patrick on the morning of the pilgrimage. He had been shot in the chest and in the back of the head. I will always feel responsible for that. The Inspector and I concocted a plan to lure the thieves of the Westport paintings to a house that they thought wasn’t guarded by Ormonde’s Orangemen, but was, in fact, guarded by a different lot of police. A young man with a father in jail was persuaded to tell the group that contained the thieves that Burke Hall was not guarded. I don’t know what inducement was offered, early release for his parent perhaps, but the message got through. One of the ringleaders of the thieves was shot in their attack but they got away. When they discovered who had betrayed them, they dragged the young man up Croagh Patrick, tortured him and shot him. Inspector Harkness was told the torture had been quite frightful before he died.’
‘You mustn’t punish yourself, my lord,’ said the Inspector. ‘If the plan had worked, we would have captured one half of the thieves and the investigation would have been half over.’
‘But we didn’t catch them,’ said Powerscourt sadly. ‘The young man’s dead.’ He looked down at the table for a moment or two before he continued.
‘It was late in the day when I realized that the motive was not money at all. It was land. It could only be land. The four houses where the paintings were stolen have some of the richest, the most valuable land in Ireland. Irish landlords are selling up in droves after the Wyndham Act, but not these four. Connolly talked to me about a hunger for land round here, a hunger so strong that on market days you could almost smell it. Mulcahy wanted land. I believe he has made offers for some of the Butler and Moore estates in the past and always been rebuffed. The other Mulcahy wanted land. They were desperate for it. Sell them so many hundred acres, or so many thousand, and you get your paintings or your wives back. I’m sure they’d have been happy to pay a reasonable asking price. Connolly paid up. He sold them the land they asked for. The land agent in Athlone admitted to me that he had had recent dealings with Connolly. It’s caused terrible trouble, land in Ireland, lack of it for so many in the famine years, the Land War, the boycotts. Land, the hunger for land, was at the bottom of the whole affair.
‘I have left what I am sure is the most painful part of my account of the affair to the end, painful, that is, to the people in this room. What I am about to say is going to upset many of you. It certainly upsets me. As with so many of my theories in this investigation, I doubt if I could actually prove it in a court of law. You will remember that I raised earlier the question of Mulcahy’s brains, the mind behind much of the enterprise. Young James, as we all know, has now disappeared. Young James said, in a very pointed fashion when we were all playing cards some weeks ago, that he never played cards for money, never. It was said with such feeling that I suspected there was some secret behind it.
‘I asked Inspector Harkness here to find out if Young James had incurred any gambling debts in his time at Trinity. He would not be the first. He will not be the last. The Inspector discovered that Young James had run up fifteen hundred pounds of debt, playing at cards for money, in his last year at university. However,’ he could read disbelief in the faces all around him, ‘all those debts were cleared, paid off, in May, before the paintings began to disappear. In Mulcahy’s loan book, which I have in my possession, there is a record of a loan of fifteen hundred pounds to a James of Butler’s Court, also in May. One loan paid off the others. But there is more. I think Young James sold the idea of the robberies of the paintings to Pronsias Mulcahy in return for an alleviation of his debt. James was the brains. Mulcahy supplied the rest. Two days after the Butler paintings were taken, seven hundred and fifty pounds was deducted from Young James’s loan. The day after the Connolly pictures were returned, a further quarter was deducted. It was a bargain, pure and simple.’ The reason I asked, after the abduction of Mrs Moore and her sister, if there was a Butler Lodge in the west, was that I already suspected Young James, and he would have known about Butler’s Lodge. He lived with the Butlers after all.
‘Why did he disappear?’ asked Sylvia Butler, who had been particularly fond of the young man.
‘He disappeared shortly after the body of the young man was found on Croagh Patrick. I don’t know if you are aware of it, but bullets in the back of the head can be the mark of the execution of a traitor in the world of the Fenians or the Irish Republican Brotherhood. I think
Young James panicked. He hadn’t intended to have anything to do with these violent characters. He thought it would be better if he cleared off, disappeared in case he was next for the shooting.’
More champagne was circulated. Throughout Powerscourt’s account Richard Butler had been looking at his ancestors on the walls rather than his investigator at the end of his table.
‘I’m nearly through,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’ve gone on far too long already. I’m sorry it took me so long to find the answers. I was looking at things the wrong way, you see. In most investigations there is one thief, or one murderer, or one blackmailer. Here there was a much larger cast, Young James, the Mulcahy brothers, the young men of the GAA and so on. I’m sure that ghastly priest Father O’Donovan Brady had something to do with it all but I’m damned if I can pin anything on him. Maybe he was the link with the young men with the hurling sticks, I don’t know. Anyway,’ he opened his hands in a gesture that might have been of completion or might have been resignation, ‘it’s finished, it’s all over now.’
‘What about the attempt on your life, Francis?’ said Lucy. ‘When the bicycle was tampered with.’
‘I didn’t think you knew about that, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, wondering if he had a rival in detection in the person of his wife. ‘I think it was a warning shot from some local hothead. I don’t think they meant to kill me, they just wanted to frighten me.’
That afternoon Powerscourt and Lady Lucy sat under an enormous awning on the Butler lawn and Powerscourt fell asleep. He was roused by a vigorous clap on the back from Dennis Ormonde.
‘Well done, man, I cannot thank you enough! Wife back! Paintings back! Happiness back! Bloody Orangemen can be kitted out with thousands of rounds of potato bread and sent home to bloody Ulster!’
Late that afternoon Ormonde, Butler and Moore all disappeared into Butler’s study for half an hour and then emerged, grinning hugely. As the company were taking drinks before dinner, Richard Butler rose to his feet and appealed for silence.
‘Lord Powerscourt, Lady Powerscourt, I, or rather we,’ he nodded at Ormonde and Moore, ‘wish to make a suggestion. In the normal course of things we would even now be preparing to hand over a most generous cheque in recognition of your services. But this evening we have a different proposal to put before you.’
Powerscourt had no idea what was coming. Were they going to offer him a painting? Please God, not some bloody horse.
‘The name of Powerscourt has been absent for too long from the land registers of this country,’ Butler went on, ‘a name that stretched back to the Normans, a family rich in history and devoted to the service of the state. We want to set that right. We want the name of Powerscourt back where it belongs in the bosom of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Will you accept, for your family and all your descendants, in recognition of your service in this matter, the gift of Butler Lodge and all the land and waters that go with it?’
Powerscourt was astonished. Those wide open skies. The desolate beauty of the lakes and the mountains. Fishing with Thomas. The Atlantic Ocean pounding at the coast. Yachting with the children. The light, so bright in summer that things were impossibly clear.
‘You’re pulling my leg,’ he said at first. ‘You must be pulling my leg.’
All three assured him they were deadly serious. ‘Then I accept,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet. ‘I accept with great pleasure on behalf of Lucy and myself and all Powerscourts yet to come. What a very great honour! What a very great privilege! What joy!’ He was almost in tears as he sat down, Lady Lucy moving to his side.
After this investigation Powerscourt and his wife did not go abroad for a holiday as they usually did at the end of a case. They went west to Butler Lodge, shortly to be renamed Powerscourt Lodge by the Archbishop of Tuam with Butlers, Moores and Ormondes as guests of honour. The new proprietor spent his days quietly, pottering about his estate to establish how much land and mountain he actually owned. The new proprietor’s wife began moving the furniture about on the second day, just making the place more comfortable, as she put it, and commencing a detailed inventory of china, bed linen and other necessities of life. They were both supremely happy.
EPILOGUE
Ten days later Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were back in Markham Square. Powerscourt was peering at an envelope with a strange postmark that had come in the second post. There was something familiar about the handwriting. Then he remembered where he had seen this distinctive, rather ornate hand before. He had noticed it when he picked a page of script up off the floor at the children’s concert in Butler’s Court. He called for Lady Lucy and opened the letter. He smiled.
‘Lucy, he said, ‘you weren’t there for Uncle Peter’s account of Parnell’s funeral, were you? At one point Young James interrupted at the mention of a young woman called Maud Gonne who was a friend of the poet W.B. Yeats.’
‘I was reading Yeats that last day at Butler’s Court, Francis, when you raided Mulcahy’s.’
‘Maybe that’s an omen. Anyway, Young James said Gonne was Yeats’s bitch goddess, she wouldn’t marry him, she wouldn’t leave him alone.’
‘What’s that got to do with this letter, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy.
Her husband held it up. ‘It comes from Boston, Massachusetts. This is Young James’s handwriting. There’s no precise address, and no date. The front side says Bitch and the back says Goddess. Then the front side says:
‘Fasten your hair with a golden pin,
And bind up every wandering tress;
I bade my heart build these poor rhymes:
It worked at them, day out, day in,
Building a sorrowful loveliness
Out of the battles of old times.
‘You need but lift a pearl-pale hand,
And bind up your long hair and sigh;
And all men’s hearts must burn and beat;
And candle-like foam on the dim sand,
And stars climbing the dew-dropping sky,
Live but to light your passing feet.’
‘It’s so beautiful, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Do you think the poet is still writing to his bitch goddess?’
‘I’m sure that’s what Young James thinks. He was always very fond of Yeats. But don’t you see, Lucy, he’s letting us know that he’s alive, that he’s in America for the present. Maybe Young James will come back some day.’
‘And what does the other side of the letter say?’
Powerscourt read very quietly, pausing every now and then to look into Lady Lucy’s eyes.
‘Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’
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