Death on the Holy Mountain

by David Dickinson

  Powerscourt was suddenly struck by a thought that had absolutely no relevance to the conversation. He was not going to be asked to stay. He was certain of it. There had been no mention of green bedrooms or the most comfortable room in the attic. In landlord Ireland, famed for its hospitality and its generosity, this was unthinkable. He knew the stories, of houses where over a hundred guests would stay for weeks at a time, head after head of prime cattle slaughtered to fill the table. One apocryphal story concerned an assistant surveyor who had come to do some work on the house and stayed for a year and a half. After a week the family forgot his name and felt it rude to inquire again. Short of a slap in the face, a refusal to invite a visitor to stay for the night was one of the biggest insults you could offer.

  ‘I’m sure you’re being too pessimistic, Mr Connolly,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I thought things had been relatively peaceful here over the last few years. But tell me this, did you get a letter from the thieves? Demands of some sort? Blackmail perhaps?’

  ‘I have not,’ said Connolly and something in his downward look told Powerscourt the man was lying. ‘You talk of peaceful times over here. Things are never what they seem in Ireland, never,’ said Connolly darkly. ‘And now, if you will forgive me, I have work to do. We can’t all spend our time swanning round other people’s houses asking damn fool questions. My coachman will take you into the town. I booked a room for you in the Kincarrig Arms. It is a perfectly respectable hotel. I do not wish to have you staying in my house. Good afternoon.’

  With that Peter Connolly ushered Powerscourt to the door and vanished into another part of the house.

  The Connolly house had a little river running past its front door. Butler’s Court, the Butler residence a few miles south of Athlone, stood a couple of hundred feet above Ireland’s greatest river, the Shannon. Visitors to the house could arrive by road or water. In summer the river meandered gently south towards the sea; in spring and autumn when the rains were heavy it flooded slightly. In winter it looked sullen, dark and forbidding, its waters swirling their way into black eddies as it rumbled down to Limerick and the Atlantic Ocean.

  Powerscourt’s first thought as he looked at the house was that he had seen it before. He was in some great square in Italy, in Siena or Perugia perhaps, looking at the great town house of some local aristocrat. Dimly, he remembered that the principal architect of Butler’s Court was Italian. He felt relieved that the front of the house appeared to be unchanged. So many Irish houses had been altered, defaced in his view, in the previous century by a fad for neo-Gothic that included turrets and battlements and fake towers. Maybe it was because the leading architects of the day preferred this style of building. Maybe it was keeping up with your neighbours. Powerscourt had the rather fanciful notion that somewhere in the back of their minds these Irish patricians felt threatened by the world around them. The peaceful Regency fronts, all proportion and good taste, would not be enough to defend them from the hostile forces that surrounded them. So they felt safer with their walkways and their turrets. Nobody had taken the style so far back in history as to have a moat and a drawbridge, but Powerscourt thought these would have sold well.

  Butler’s Court’s central block was built of grey stone with thirteen bays along the front. Two curved colonnades of golden Ardbroccan stone linked the main building to two flanking pavilions which contained the kitchen and the stables. There was no pillared porch to mark the front door of the house. The front door sat unobtrusively in its place as if it were just another window. A set of steps led down to the gravel drive. It should look heavy, massive, Powerscourt thought as he approached the front door, but it didn’t. Butler’s Court looked light and graceful.

  In the Connolly house he had only met the diminutive butler and the disagreeable Mr Connolly. Here it was rather different. A Butler’s Court footman, a tall and imposing fellow called Hardy with military bearing, had scarcely opened the door to him when a balding middle-aged gentleman shot forwards from one of the many doors to shake him firmly by the hand.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt, welcome to Butler’s Court! Delighted to meet you! I am Richard Butler and this is my house.’ Powerscourt was just about to reply when he heard the singing. The front hall had a chequered black and white marble floor and a mighty staircase of cantilevered Portland stone. The sound was coming from a gallery on the first floor.

  ‘We soldiers of Erin, so proud of the name,

  We’ll raise upon rebels and Frenchman our fame.

  We’ll fight to the last in the honest old cause

  And guard our religion, our freedom and laws.

  We’ll fight for our country, our King and his crown

  And make all the traitors and croppies lie down.

  Down, down, croppies lie down.’

  The children were coming into the gallery, holding hands, boys and girls together. There were so many that Powerscourt wondered if he had wandered into a school.

  ‘The rebels so bold, when they’ve none to oppose,

  To houses and haystacks are terrible foes.

  They murder poor parsons and also their wives

  But soldiers at once make them run for their lives,

  And whenever we march, through country to town,

  In ditches or cellars the croppies lie down.

  Down, down, croppies lie down.’

  ‘They’re not all mine,’ whispered Richard Butler as the leading couple in this strange procession reached the top of the stairs and began the descent into the hall below past one of the few remaining portraits of an early Butler and elaborate rococo stuccowork on the wall.

  Powerscourt wasn’t sure he would teach his children this song. It referred to the defeat of the rebels in the rising of 1798. Croppies were called croppies because they wore their hair cut short in the style made popular by the French Revolution. Croppies, with a few exceptions, would have been Catholic. It was, in effect, a cry of triumph, particularly popular with the Orange Lodges and the Protestant hardliners in the north of Ireland.

  The front rank were now passing the chimney piece of black Kilkenny marble and heading straight for the front door, looking neither to the right nor to the left of them. Richard Butler was smiling affectionately at them all as they passed. At last the supply of singers seemed to have dried up. Then Powerscourt saw who was in charge. Bringing up the rear was a tall, almost emaciated young man in a black suit that had seen better days.

  ‘Oh, croppies, ye’d better be quiet and still,

  Ye shan’t have your liberty, do what ye will.

  As long as salt water is formed in the deep,

  A foot on the necks of the croppy we’ll keep,

  And drink, as in bumpers past troubles we drown,

  A health to the lads that made croppies lie down.

  Down, down, croppies lie down.’

  The tall thin young man with the fair hair and the soft blue eyes saluted Powerscourt and Richard Butler gravely as he passed into the garden to join his charges.

  ‘James, James Cuffe is the young man’s name,’ said Richard Butler. ‘He’s the eighth son of a family nearby. Poor woman always wanted a daughter. She ended up with a cricket team of boys and a twelfth man. A dozen boys! Can you imagine it! James comes here to teach some of the younger children like the ones in the garden. We’ve got cousins’ and neighbours’ children as well. He’s wonderful with them. Never seems to raise his voice at all. Don’t know how he does it. Wife believes the small children think he’s a giant and will cast wicked spells on them if they misbehave.’

  Butler began to steer Powerscourt towards a pair of double doors. The noise inside seemed to have stopped. ‘Forgive me, Powerscourt, let’s get things sorted. We’ve put you in the green bedroom on the first floor. There’s a good view of the river and the housemaids are all convinced it’s haunted by a man with his head in his hand. Don’t believe a word of it myself. No work for you today. There are three people who knew the lost pictures well, myself, Hardy the senior footman and th
e parlour maid Mary who dusted the frames. We’re all going to assemble for you at ten o’clock in the morning. Now then,’ he showed Powerscourt into the Green Drawing Room, so called because the walls were lined with green silk, ‘the young people have all gone off for a walk, so there’s just the three of us for tea.’

  Sylvia Butler looked about forty and still retained most of the beauty that must have dazzled her husband into marriage all those years ago. She captured Powerscourt’s heart with a charming smile as she indicated he was to sit beside her.

  ‘How was our cousin Brandon when you saw him?’ she inquired sweetly. ‘Was he afflicted with that gout at the time?’

  ‘Alas, Mrs Butler, it was bad with him, very bad. I think he suffers a great deal.’

  ‘The doctors tell him he must stop drinking. That would be the best cure,’ Mrs Butler said, ‘but I think he would find it difficult. Tell me, did he have to take any of those special pills of his, the ones he calls Davy Jones’s Lockers?’

  A footman entered with a tray of tea, laden with cakes and scones and barm brack, a fruity sort of cake to be consumed with butter as if it were toast, very popular in Ireland.

  ‘The last time we saw cousin Brandon,’ Mrs Butler went on as the footman disappeared out of the door, ‘he had to take one of these pills. After a quarter of an hour he collapsed on a sofa and slept for five hours.’

  ‘He took one just before I departed,’ said Powerscourt as Mrs Butler began to pour the tea, ‘but he was still compos mentis as I left the house. I think he must have had a minute or two to go. He was still swearing at the doctors as I went down the stairs.’

  ‘Scone, Lord Powerscourt? Barm brack?’

  Powerscourt suddenly wondered how many teas were served in an afternoon in a grand house like Butler’s Court. He put the question to Mrs Butler.

  ‘Three,’ she said. ‘Otherwise the whole thing gets out of hand. We have one for the children, one for the servants and one for us.’

  ‘You must be remembering the stories,’ said her husband with a smile. ‘There’s a family near here where the servants valued the distinctions in status between themselves so much that they ended up serving lots of different teas every day. On most afternoons tea would be served in ten different places. The Lord and Lady and their guests had it in the drawing room. The elder children and their governess had it in the schoolroom: the younger children and their nannies and the nursery maids had it in the nursery. The upper servants, together with the visiting ladies’ maids, had it in the housekeeper’s room. The footmen had it in the servants’ hall. The housemaids had it in the housemaids’ sitting room, the kitchen maids had it in the kitchen and the charwomen had it in the stillroom. The laundry maids had it in the laundry and the grooms took it in the harness room. Once a week a riding master came from Dublin to give the children a lesson and the number of places where tea was served went up to eleven; for while he was too grand to have tea with the servants or the grooms, he was not grand enough to have it with the gentry in the drawing room, so he was given a tray on his own.’

  Powerscourt laughed. His eye was drawn to three gaps on the walls. Over the mantelpiece was an enormous hole, with two smaller ones on either side of it. He supposed all would be revealed in the morning. At dinner that evening – he had forgotten how much food was consumed in these houses – he noticed another eight empty spaces on the green walls, dark lines marking where the edges of the paintings had met the wall, the paint a paler green than the surrounding area, the squares or the rectangles looking like undressed wounds.

  All through the afternoon and evening a great number of people asked Powerscourt the same question. ‘Have you met Great Uncle Peter yet?’ The children asked him with great interest, running away in fits of giggles when he answered. The grown-ups would smile to themselves when they too learned that Powerscourt had not yet made the gentleman’s acquaintance. With great difficulty he managed to discover that the great uncle was extremely old, so old that even he had forgotten how old he was, and that he was writing a history of Ireland.

  James Cuffe, Young James as everybody called him, the tall thin young man who looked after the children, played the piano after dinner. He was unobtrusive, rattling through some pieces by Chopin with restraint. Then he was persuaded to accompany a young army wife, Alice Bracken, as she sang some songs by Thomas Moore.

  ‘Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,

  Which I gaze on so fondly today,

  Were to change by tomorrow, and fleet in my arms,

  Like fairy-gifts fading away,

  Thou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art,

  Let thy loveliness fade as it will,

  And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart

  Would entwine itself verdantly still.’

  Powerscourt felt himself sinking into a languid draught of nostalgia. His mother used to sing this song, leaning on the edge of the piano with the drawing-room doors wide open to the garden in spring and summer, the waters of the great fountain just audible from the bottom of the steps, faint evening noises blending in with the music. His father would be playing the piano, rather badly, for he had taught himself to play and his finger movements would have appalled the fastidious music teachers of Dublin. And Powerscourt himself, a small boy of eight or nine, rather an earnest child, he thought, would be staring at his mother and praying that she would not stop and send him to bed. Sometimes when more expert hands were available at the keys, his mother would sing duets with some of the guests, two voices twinning and twisting round each other and floating out into the Wicklow air. He thought that was his favourite memory of his mother. His mind turned suddenly to Lady Lucy. Maybe he would bring her over and she too could sing for Ireland in this great house by the river.

  ‘It is not while beauty and youth are thine own,

  And thy cheeks unprofaned by a tear

  That the fervour and faith of a soul can be known,

  To which time will but make thee more dear;

  No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets,

  But as truly loves on to the close,

  As the sunflower turns on her god, when he sets,

  The same look which she turned when he rose.’

  Richard Butler along with his footman and Mary the parlour maid were on parade in the dining room promptly at ten o’clock the next morning. Hardy the footman looked even more military today, standing to attention as if he were a sergeant major on parade. Mary was shuffling anxiously from foot to foot as if she were about to undergo some disagreeable medical procedure.

  ‘Now then,’ Richard Butler was brisk and cheerful this morning, ‘let’s begin with this full-length over the door. Can you remember who it was?’

  There was a silence from his two experts, the footman who saw the painting at least a dozen times a day and the girl who dusted the frame every morning except Sundays when she was given time off to go to Mass. Finally Hardy coughed slightly.

  ‘There was a name on the bottom right of the frame, sir, but I can’t remember what it said.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Butler, pausing to write something in a small black notebook, ‘what was the gentleman wearing?’

  ‘Blue?’ said Hardy hesitantly.

  ‘Black?’ said Mary.

  ‘I thought it was green, a green cloak over his shoulders,’ said Richard Butler, a slight irritation beginning to show. He made some more notes. ‘How about this other full-length Butler, the one over the fireplace?’

  ‘He was sitting at a table, that one,’ said the footman, ‘with papers all over it.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t, he was sitting on a horse,’ said Mary defiantly. ‘An enormous horse.’

  ‘That was your man on the other wall, opposite the door,’ said Hardy, ‘not this fellow here.’

  ‘The man on the horse, surely,’ said Butler, frowning slightly now, ‘was in the drawing room by the door. Big black horse.’

  ‘Brown,’ said Hardy, ‘the h
orse, I mean.’

  ‘Well,’ said Richard Butler, ‘I’m not sure we’re making much progress. If the one on the other wall was on a horse, then this one can’t have been on a horse too, can he? What was he doing?’

  ‘No reason why he shouldn’t have been on a horse,’ said the footman, ‘logically, I mean.’

  ‘Are you saying,’ asked Butler, ‘that this one was on a horse too?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ replied Hardy, ‘I was only pointing out that there was no reason why he shouldn’t have been on a horse.’

  ‘Well,’ said Butler, a note of exasperation coming into his voice now, ‘if he wasn’t on a horse, what was he doing?’

  ‘Sure, he wasn’t doing anything,’ said Mary, rejoining the argument, ‘he was just standing there, looking at something, like those country fellows leaning on a gate.’

  ‘You’re not saying my distinguished ancestor was just leaning on a gate, are you, Mary?’

  ‘No, no, sir, it was just the look of him.’

  ‘I think you’ll find, sir,’ said Hardy with a note of finality, ‘that this gentleman here, over the fireplace, was the legal gentleman, with a judge’s red cloak and a lot of papers on a table in front of him.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t,’ said Mary with spirit, ‘your man with the wig and stuff was above the other door, so he was. There was a crack in his frame, you see, and I always remember thinking that the legal man was going to sentence me to be transported to Tasmania or some dreadful place.’