Death on the Holy Mountain

by David Dickinson

  ‘You sound very definite about that, Mary,’ said Butler. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I am sure, so I am,’ said the girl firmly.

  ‘Not so, you are mistaken,’ said the footman firmly. ‘The legal party was not above that door. He was by the mantelpiece here, watching his descendants eat their meals, so he was.’

  ‘The devil he was, Augustus Hardy. Isn’t it your eyes that need testing now, and you hardly able to read the headlines in the Freeman’s Journal?’

  ‘Please, please,’ said Richard Butler, ‘let us not fall out. Why don’t we have a look in the drawing room next door?’

  Another gaping wound stared at them from above the fireplace. ‘I’m sure we can agree about this one,’ said Butler hopefully. ‘This was the painting of the hunt, done fairly recently. I forgot to mention it to Lord Brandon, Powerscourt. Most of the county hunt, all in their scarlet coats, were assembled by the front door of the house, mostly men, including myself, of course, but a few women as well. The house was in the background.’

  Both footman and parlour maid agreed about that. They ventured back into the dining room. But that was all they could agree about. On the dispositions and dress of the other two portraits they disagreed violently. One, according to Hardy, showed a Butler leaning on his fireplace, a book in his left hand, a dog asleep at his feet. Nonsense, said Mary, none of those Butlers were shown with a book, heaven only knew if they could read or not, some of them, it was all so long ago, and if anybody thought she, Mary, would not remember whether one of the gentlemen was reading or not, they were a fool. The other painting, the footman maintained, showed a Butler resplendent in cricket clothes, a cap over his head, a bat in his hand, pads on his legs, obviously waiting to stride out to the wicket. Mary agreed that there had been such a Butler, but it was a smaller Butler and he had been positioned between the fireplace and door. There was, Powerscourt thought, very considerable disagreement among the witnesses. If it had been a court case the judge might well have thrown it out because of the gross confusion about the evidence. The only thing the participants agreed on was that the people in the paintings were Butlers. Their hair might be black or brown or grey or silver or white or non-existent. Their jackets, likewise, might be blue or black or brown or red; they might be wearing cloaks of dark blue or red; they could be lawyers or hunters or cricketers. They could be smiling or scowling, their noses great or small, their eyes any colour of the rainbow, their chins clean shaven or covered with a beard that might also be black or brown or even white. There was no certainty about any of these Butlers. They were changelings to the footman who tended them and the girl who dusted their frames. Richard Butler was looking very cross indeed.

  ‘There is confusion everywhere,’ he said. ‘How can I give an accurate description of the vanished pictures to the authorities?’ Powerscourt thought Hardy and the girl had looked at the paintings so often that they didn’t really see them any more; they had all merged into a kind of composite Butler for all rooms and for all seasons in their minds. Once the paintings had gone from the walls, they rearranged themselves in the footman’s and the girl’s brains until they were seriously confused. They might have been clearer had they only seen the paintings once.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Powerscourt, ‘if you have many visitors to this house, people who like looking at old houses, that sort of thing?’

  ‘We do,’ said Butler, ‘we have them all the time. Most of them are very well behaved.’

  ‘Do you have any architectural people, Butler? People who might take photographs of the house and its rooms?’

  ‘I see what you’re driving at, Powerscourt,’ said Richard Butler, beginning to look much more cheerful. ‘We have had such people though I don’t think they ever sent us any photographs. But we did have a chap ourselves, now I come to think about it, a chap to take photographs of the place about five years ago. I’d completely forgotten about the fellow. We wanted a record of how the place looked at the turn of the century. I’ve still got them in my study. Hold on, I’ll be back in a second.’

  Richard Butler departed at full speed. The footman was looking rather disappointed, as if he thought the parlour maid had got the better of him in the discussion about the missing paintings. The girl was looking defiant.

  ‘Tell me, Hardy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘could one man lift one of those full-length portraits off the wall and carry it outside?’

  ‘He would have to be very strong, my lord,’ Hardy replied. ‘The things are a very awkward shape, if you see what I mean. Much easier with two.’

  The owner of Butler’s Court returned with his wife and the biggest photograph album Powerscourt had ever seen. ‘It’s a pretty big house,’ he said to Powerscourt apologetically, laying the album out on the dining-room table.’ Powerscourt wondered if he had brought Sylvia, as charming in the mornings as she was in the afternoons, to keep the peace between the squabbling servants. Gradually, over an hour or so, the various Butler ancestors were restored to life as they had lived it on the walls of their dining room and their drawing room. Hair of the right colour was finally restored to the right head. The hunter, the lawyer and the cricketer all returned to their proper places. Clothes that had been blue were finally adjudged to have been black, clean-shaven men were transformed into men with beards and vice versa. It was, Powerscourt thought, a most pleasing transformation, and he joined Richard Butler in entering all the details in his notebook. Mary the parlour maid departed to dust the rest of the paintings. The footman shimmered off to his own quarters. Mrs Butler went upstairs to change for a picnic lunch on an island in the river. Mr Butler carried off his giant album back to his study. Powerscourt announced his intention to walk all round the ground floor and inspect the windows. He would, he said, follow them to the island. He might be late as he had some more notes to take.

  A determined burglar could have found his way into the house easily enough. There were one or two places where the windows were not quite secure. After half an hour or so Powerscourt returned to the dining room. He perched on the edge of a chair and stared at the empty patches on the walls. He checked the notes he had made of the Butler inventory of the paintings. A number of blank rectangles marked the spaces where the second, third, fourth, sixth and seventh Thomas Butler had claimed their places to a surrogate eternal life on the walls of their dining room. The first Thomas, Powerscourt had been told by the seventh, had been too busy building his house and establishing himself in the extra acres given to his grandfather by Cromwell so that he never had the time to sit for his portrait. Another Thomas had flatly refused to sit for his portrait at all. He was constitutionally incapable of sitting still, Richard Butler said, his restless irritability only soothed by sitting on a horse, or rather, charging around on his horse more or less permanently, which is why he hunted six days a week when he could and even threatened to hunt on Sundays as well until the local bishop intervened with telling quotations from the Book of Genesis about six days shalt thou labour. All those family portraits gone from here altogether, all male, the women still demure in their places. And a few Old Masters.

  The great house was very quiet now, the inhabitants all departed in high excitement on their trip on the river, rowing boats prepared for the journey to the island in the middle where, by long tradition, the family had their picnic lunch during the summer in some style with three sorts of wine and a bottle of port that could solve the problem for the more elderly among the Butlers of what to do in the afternoon. Powerscourt walked down to the library and stared out of the great windows, the air very clear this morning, the Shannon bright and close, the line of the trees where the forest began sharp in the light.

  Powerscourt was looking at the books now, column after column of them marching silently towards the ceiling. Many of his favourites were here, Thucydides and Tacitus, gloomy chroniclers of the failings of their great powers, George Eliot, Tolstoy. But it wasn’t the contents of the leather volumes that interested him. It was words, the word
s that made up the books, the words the authors used to tell their stories. Words, he thought, words were very dangerous in Ireland. Theobald Wolfe Tone, a not very successful barrister in the Dublin of the 1790s, became intoxicated with words that had crossed the seas from France. Liberty. Freedom. Equality. They featured large in the thinking of the United Irishmen, formed to unite Catholic and Protestant and set Ireland free from English rule. Some men made their living by cutting cloth or growing corn or selling provisions or dealing in livestock. Lawyers looked at words on a page and invested them with meaning. Illiterate peasants in the west of Ireland swore the Oath of Tone’s United Irishmen, not understanding what most of the words meant. ‘I will persevere in endeavouring to form a brotherhood of affection among Irishmen of all persuasions.’ Freedom or Equality meant little when you lived in a mud cabin and had scarcely enough food to feed your family. Freedom meant little when a man with a different religion whose ancestors came from England to take your land, a man who lived in a great stone house with lakes and tall windows and libraries with portraits of his family, could throw you out of your tiny patch of earth and pull down your stinking hovel. Liberty. Equality. Fraternity. Words. Words written on a page by lawyers. Words that took those Mayo peasants far from their homes in the rebellion of 1798 to fight their last battle at Ballinamuck in County Longford, slaughtered by the English dragoons on the hillside or butchered in the bog. Words had killed them. And those who were taken prisoner by the English that day? Words killed them too. A word called treason saw them hanged. Powerscourt wondered what might have happened if Theobald Wolfe Tone had been more successful as a lawyer. Or, indeed, that other lawyer associated with freedom, liberty, equality, Maximilien Robespierre, a man so drunk with words that he tried to abolish religion and replace it with rituals and celebrations in honour of reason. Reason, another word. God wasn’t dead yet. Not that time anyway. He was soon back, if he had ever really gone away. It was Robespierre who perished instead, consumed on the guillotine by his own words.

  Words were dangerous in Ireland. Catholic. Protestant. Mass. The Virgin Mary. Fenian. Informer. All had been dangerous in their time. Some still were. Now new words were coming, boycott already officially entered in the dictionaries. Captain Charles Boycott was a land agent in the west of Ireland who refused to grant a reduction in rents to his tenants in 1880 after two years of bad harvests. Powerscourt strolled over to one of the bookshelves and pulled out a biography of the Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell which included his description of what boycott meant at a huge meeting in Ennis in County Clare. This was what was to happen to a landlord who refused to reduce rents or a man who took over the farm of an evicted tenant: ‘You must show what you think of him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him on the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop counter . . . even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a sort of moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed.’ Many people in Ireland other than Boycott were boycotted. Powerscourt’s father had told him of Ascendancy families who had refused to reduce their rents. Unable to bear the psychological strain of the ordeal, they had fled their houses and their lands, conceding victory to the foe. They settled instead in quiet English towns like Cheltenham or Tunbridge Wells where the respectability of the suburbs could atone for the eternal silences of the Irish shopkeepers and the defection of their own servants. But, Powerscourt thought as he returned the book to its place, it was the abstract words that were the most dangerous. The words that represented ideas that could send men to deaths as it had those Mayo peasants in the 1798 rebellion. He thought of another category of words, designed to describe the proper functions of society as if it were a well-made watch or clock. Political economy. Laissez-faire. People being forced to stand on their own two feet. Words written by people in great libraries like this one perhaps, remote from reality, that encouraged the British Government in the 1840s to believe that it was wrong to interfere with the workings of the market, that the starvation in Ireland was an act of God and the Irish needed a lesson to tell them how to farm their land properly. One million Irish dead in the famine testified to the wisdom of those words and the political economists who wrote them and gave that advice. Another million or more fled to America in the next generation. More words on a page, the flies’ feet of an alphabet that could send men and women to mass graves, unmarked and unmourned, thrown into fields by the hundred and left to rot in the Irish earth that had failed them.

  There was the sound of loud complaint coming from the garden. Another Thomas Butler, this one only seven years old, had apparently fallen into the water and was being brought back to the house for a change of clothing. This he regarded as a monstrous injustice, depriving him not just of the company of his brothers and sisters, but of the innumerable fish of unimaginable size he would have caught during his time of banishment. Powerscourt smiled as the argument moved past his windows and into the great hall. He looked round the library once more, filled with words, millions of them. The most dangerous word in Ireland, he decided, inspecting critically a section devoted to theological works, was God. God or perhaps Nation. On balance, he thought, God had it.

  3

  Mrs Alice Bracken was lying on her back on the grass circle in the middle of Butler Island in the centre of the River Shannon where the Butler family had repaired for lunch. It was a beautiful day. The sun was beating down on Alice’s face though she thought she would only have to move a couple of feet to her left to be in the shade. A young cousin of the Butlers, currently staying at Butler’s Court, John Peter Kilross was lying on the ground at right angles to Alice and dropping strawberries into her mouth very slowly. They were cool and fresh as she bit into them. The girl rather liked receiving her fruit in this fashion, though she thought it would be more difficult with the larger specimens like the melons or pineapples currently ripening in the great glasshouses at the back of the house.

  Alice Bracken had been born Alice Harvey twenty-three years before, third of five daughters of Mr and Mrs Warwick Harvey who owned an estate at Ballindeary near Castlebar in County Mayo. Many people thought all Irish patricians lived in enormous mansions like Butler’s Court, with vast estates, innumerable horses and virtually uncountable wealth. It was not always thus. Often in his cups Mr Harvey would mutter to his children about the Encumbered Estates Court and how close they were to being delivered into it. When she was very young Alice had thought an Encumbered Estates Court was just another big house with a demesne like Florence Court in County Fermanagh where her cousins lived. Only later did the terrible truth dawn on her as her elder sisters told her what it really meant. It was, she reflected ruefully at the time, rather like learning the truth about Father Christmas, only worse. The Encumbered Estates Court was where the law sent people who were bankrupt, who owed so much money they could not pay their debts. They could languish for years in these insalubrious surroundings while the lawyers collected their fees and decided what do with the land and the house. Warwick Harvey’s father and grandfather had both borrowed large amounts of money to extend their house. Their grandson and son had to pay the interest and the bills. When the harvest was bad, the diet in Ballindeary Park was little better than that of their poorest tenants. When they were invited to the local hunt balls only one girl was able to go at a time as there was only one ball gown fit to be seen in public and it had to be altered to fit one of five different shapes every time it left the house. Most of the girls’ days after they reached maturity were spent wondering if they could ever escape, if their lives were to be spent in something worse than genteel poverty, eking out the tea leaves for another afternoon, water the only drink in the house apart from the cheap whiskey which her father consumed to ease his sorrows. Even then he diluted it so heavily that the taste of the whiskey was like a noise heard far away, remote and distant as though a visitor was tiptoe
ing away from your house in the dark.

  In these circumstances it was not surprising that the thoughts of the girls should concentrate on young men. Maybe middle-aged men. Even older men if they had an income and a roof to put above their wife’s head. Any visitor who came to see their father, surveyor, bailiff, parson, was inspected in minute detail by ten voracious eyes. Young curates, when they could be found, were often a source of fevered speculation, but their mother had to remind the girls that young curates in the parish of Ballindeary, soon to be united with the neighbouring parish to form the larger unit of Ballindeary and Carryduff, were not likely to be rich men. One of the curates appeared to be so poor that he could not even afford a horse and walked everywhere. Officers provided the most regular source of fantasy and imaginary escape. The neighbouring town of Castlebar was a garrison town, regularly furnished with English soldiers. The officers, almost all English with a sprinkling from Scotland, were forever looking for excuses to dance with the local young ladies, to flirt with them, to pass the time in whatever romantic entanglements they could manage. Very occasionally one of the officers would overstep the mark, or one of the girls would forget herself, and the young man would be transferred so fast that the girl’s family might never find where he had gone, the girl herself sent off to Dublin to stay with her aunt for a while. Into this slightly desperate world of longing, where both parties longed for completely different things, came a tall, very handsome young officer called Captain Rufus Bracken with soft brown eyes and perfectly twirled moustaches. It was the moustaches rather than the face that most people remembered, should they chance to think about the Captain in his absence. He was the fifth son of a small landholder in Derbyshire, and though he talked loud and often to the young ladies about his vast estates in England, he was entirely dependent on his family for of fortune he had none at all.