Death on the Holy Mountain

by David Dickinson

  One fateful Saturday nearly three years before it had been Alice’s turn to wear the ball dress and she had been swept off her feet by Captain Rufus Bracken, so tall and slim, so handsome in his uniform, so distinguished with his moustaches, so obviously rich with his estates in Derbyshire. Six weeks later they were married after a whirlwind romance. The cynics or the realists hinted that Alice must have been pregnant. It was widely known that his commanding officer at the time, unlike his predecessors or his successors, was a convinced puritan who did not approve of conniving at the sudden dispatch of young Englishmen about to become fathers off to far distant shores. In his book they had to stay and do their duty. And, in fact, the cynics were wrong. Alice was not pregnant. She was, however, not entirely pleased with her first glimpse of the vast estates in Derbyshire. The house, she declared, was little better than a fishing lodge in Ireland; the income, she realized all too soon, was non-existent. They returned to Ireland where they were eventually given a small house to live in and a modest allowance by her mother’s second cousin, Richard Butler of Butler’s Court.

  The wooing, the pursuit, the chase had interested Captain Bracken greatly. The reality of marriage did not. He had no interests apart from masculine pursuits. It was perfectly fine to woo a girl with tales of the past heroism of his regiment. As the marriage lengthened from weeks into months, the stories began to pall. On his time away from military duties at Butler’s Court he found it hard to relate to the Butlers with their endless talk of horses he hadn’t seen or hunts he hadn’t attended. After one terrible row about money Captain Bracken had applied, in his fury, to be posted abroad. He had been sent to India, to the North-West Frontier, where his relations with the Pathan tribesmen were no more satisfactory than they had been with the Anglo-Irish gentry. The Captain was an indifferent correspondent, his letters sometimes taking months to arrive and containing little but inane gossip about army wives and the tiresome intrigues at The Club. Alice did not mourn his passing, except in one respect. She missed him physically. Of the loss of his conversation she was not concerned. Sometimes she wished he would never come home and would leave her to a lifetime of flirting with Ireland’s young men. Sometimes she even wished he was dead so she could marry again. Then she would reproach herself greatly and tell herself that she was a wicked person who deserved no portion of God’s grace in this world or the next.

  And so it was that she came to be lying on the ground with John Peter Kilross dropping strawberries into her mouth as she toasted herself in the sunshine. Had she thought about it – but Alice was not a great one for thought – she might have realized that this Johnpeter, the two Christian names usually run together for reasons nobody could now remember, was remarkably similar to the departed Captain Bracken of the moustaches. Only it was the voice with the young man Kilross, a voice so soft and charming that the young ladies would flock round him to hear the latest poetry or listen to him singing. Like the absent husband, Johnpeter was the fifth son of a moderate estate in County Kildare and, like Alice, a cousin of Richard Butler on his mother’s side. And while the Irish peasants divided their holdings among their children so they became smaller and smaller over time, the Anglo-Irish landlords always passed the estate on intact to the eldest son in the hope that it would grow larger and larger. So Johnpeter had few possessions apart from a pair of fine hunters and a set of silver goblets left him by his grandmother.

  ‘I wish I could lie here for ever,’ said Alice languidly, as the strawberries continued to drop into her mouth.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ replied the young man, and his voice was like honey in the girl’s ears, ‘there are still plenty left.’

  Some fifty feet away, Lord Francis Powerscourt was sitting opposite Mrs Butler in the island’s summerhouse. Normally, when the grown-ups remained in their proper places on the mainland, this summerhouse was an Indian camp out in the wilds of Wyoming, or a beleaguered British outpost in South Africa like Ladysmith or Mafeking, under siege to the terrible Boers. The children would crouch in it, firing imaginary guns from its windows, assaulting it from the roof, a position perilously reached by jumping some six feet from a nearby tree. Today the grown-ups had taken it over and the children played elsewhere, recreating great naval battles with a couple of canoes or disappearing completely up into the tops of the tall trees. It wasn’t even, the children said to themselves, as if the grown-ups did anything sensible in the summerhouse when they took it over. They just talked to each other, apart from one memorable evening when Alice and Johnpeter had been spotted kissing vigorously as the light faded when the Butler children were meant to be going to bed, but had decamped to the island instead for a midnight feast of buns and biscuits liberated from the kitchen.

  ‘This must be a very worrying time for you, Mrs Butler,’ Powerscourt began, ‘with all these pictures disappearing.’

  Sylvia Butler smiled. ‘I’ve been trying to find out,’ she said, ‘if there is any history of this sort of thing. I’ve often wondered if the ancient Celts had a tradition of this kind of activity. You steal my pelt or my club or my best stone and there is some sort of curse placed on me. Like voodoo or whatever it’s called in the West Indies. The stealing of the paintings is meant to be a mark of doom for the family. Sometimes,’ she laughed what Powerscourt thought was rather a false laugh as if she was trying to conceal her real feelings, ‘I do feel cursed. I feel not wanted. I feel some people want us to go. But it never lasts very long.’

  Powerscourt wondered if this wasn’t precisely the effect the thieves had wanted. It would be impossible, he thought, to have lived in Ireland for the last thirty years or so without realizing that some, if not a great many people wanted you to go. He thought it prudent not to mention the fact.

  ‘Your steward was mentioning to me yesterday,’ he said, ‘that one of the Christian Brothers at the school in the town down below is a great expert on the ancient Celts. Apparently he spends his holidays digging around in old ruins or ferreting about in the bogs for relics of those times.’

  ‘They always strike me as being rather sinister, those Christian Brothers,’ said Mrs Butler, ‘especially when they move about in packs. They look like ravens or crows about to do some damage or attack somebody. He is called Brother Brennan, the antiquary fellow. They say he hopes all the young farmers who pass through his hands will search their land for antiquities for him. He has great hopes of opening a museum some day with all his treasures in the main square down in Butler’s Cross, the town at the bottom of our drive. Perhaps you should go and see him, Lord Powerscourt.’

  ‘Tell me, Mrs Butler,’ Powerscourt shifted slightly in his seat to catch a view of the river through the trees, ‘who do you think is responsible for these thefts?’

  Sylvia Butler paused. Should she tell him the truth? She had only known him for twenty-four hours or so. She had met too many Irishmen with charming and plausible manners in her life who had later turned out to be men of straw. Powerscourt, she decided suddenly, was not a man of straw. Lord Brandon had spoken of him in the most glowing terms. ‘If it was a joke, a practical joke,’ she began, ‘we would know by now. Even in Ireland the practitioners would have put us out of our misery after all this time. That leaves an interesting choice, Lord Powerscourt. Thieves who intend to make a great deal of money from selling the paintings? Or men of violence, advanced nationalists as I believe they call themselves nowadays, though why it should be advanced to break into innocent people’s houses and steal their possessions I do not know.’

  She paused suddenly, as if conscious of the contrast between what she was about to say and what surrounded her, the birds singing happily in the trees on their island, the Shannon gurgling quietly on its long journey to the Atlantic, the distant laughter of the children, the heat growing stronger as they passed into early afternoon.

  ‘I’m sure it’s the men of violence,’ she said very quietly, ‘they want to get rid of us. They always have. Our land is very fertile. Richard has made it much more profitabl
e with his improvements and his educated farm managers. We even had one from Germany once, you know, Lord Powerscourt, a very earnest young man who wore enormous black boots all the time. I remember wondering if he wore them in bed but I never found the answer. Richard said he had a great feel for horse breeding. We did have one horse after he left, I recall, who won everything at the Punchestown Races three years in a row. Richard called it Wolfgang. Everybody gets richer these days, the tenants, the shopkeepers in the town, ourselves. We’ve cleared all the debts now. Richard looks so proud when he tells people that the Butlers don’t owe anybody a penny. I’m sure those Fenians or whatever they call themselves these days – the vicar is convinced their new name is the Irish Republican Brotherhood, but I wouldn’t trust the vicar to know about a thing like that – they all want to drive us out. It’s been going on for centuries. We may lose in the end, Richard and I tell ourselves in our darker moments, but we won’t go out without a fight. We’ll dance until dawn at the last hunt ball, we’ll drink the last of the stirrup cup and finish the port in the cellar, we’ll kill the last fox in Ireland and exhaust ourselves at the last tennis party. We’ll go out in glitter and glory, dressed up in our finest with Young James playing the Dead March from Saul on the piano.’

  She laughed, a rather desperate laugh, Powerscourt thought. ‘Tell me,’ he said, looking at her small delicate hands, ‘are you frightened?’

  Mrs Butler paused and looked closely at Powerscourt. ‘I thought you were going to ask me that sooner or later,’ she said. ‘It’s not an easy question to answer. Of course I could tell you that I’m not frightened at all, but that wouldn’t be true.’ She paused again. ‘Sometimes I am very frightened indeed. I think I can say in all honesty that I’m not afraid for myself. It’s the children I worry about. If these dreadful thieves can steal into our house and take the dead from the walls why can’t they take the living children from their beds? Sometimes in the night when Richard is snoring away beside me – I shouldn’t have told you he snores, should I? – and I hear the creaks and strange noises all these old houses make in the night, I think the thieves have come back. Twice now I have crept into the children’s rooms to make sure they are still there.’

  She looked at him defiantly. ‘I know what you’re going to ask me now. You’d better ask me, Lord Powerscourt.’

  ‘I’m not going to ask you that question just at the moment,’ said Powerscourt, smiling across at her, ‘I want to ask if you are sure your husband has not had a note from somebody, asking him to do something to get the pictures back. You see, Mrs Butler, surely, I have said to myself many times now, they must want something, these thieves. Why go to all the trouble of organizing these thefts, unless, of course, you want to sell the paintings and I’m not convinced that is the case, though I wouldn’t rule it out altogether. Why bother? So what do they want? They have to tell us at some point.’

  Mrs Butler folded the hands Powerscourt admired so much together and looked down at the grass. ‘I know Richard doesn’t tell me everything. It wouldn’t be natural if he did. But he hasn’t mentioned a word to me about any messages. Is he telling the truth? To be perfectly honest with you, Lord Powerscourt, I just don’t know. He might be or he might not. He can be quite devious sometimes, though not,’ she giggled like a girl at this point, ‘when he’s snoring. I’m sorry,’ she went on, ‘I know that’s no help to you at all.’

  Now Powerscourt asked the question. ‘Would you think of taking the children away, Mrs Butler?’

  ‘Please call me Sylvia,’ she said inappropriately, perhaps playing for time. ‘I’ve thought about that a lot. I think if any more pictures are stolen from any more houses – why stop at two, after all – then I might take all the younger ones to England. Except I would miss Richard terribly, even when he snores away in the middle of the night. There I go again. I can’t give you a straight answer to anything, Lord Powerscourt. How very Irish of me!’ And she laughed a nervous little laugh but her eyes were locked on Powerscourt’s face and they were very serious indeed.

  ‘I wish I could offer you some reassurance,’ Powerscourt said, ‘but I wouldn’t want to give you false comfort.’

  Their conversation was suddenly interrupted by a couple of fiendish war whoops as two small children with blackened faces shot across the grass and disappeared up a tree.

  ‘I’ve taken up enough of your time,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet. ‘I’ve got an idea. I think I’m going to have a look at the opposition, or what might be the opposition. Time to seize the initiative,’ although even as he said it, he knew he didn’t quite believe it.

  ‘Are you going to see the antiquated Christian Brother, sorry, I mean the antiquary Christian Brother?’ Sylvia Butler asked.

  ‘Nearly,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘nearly, but not quite. I’m going to call on the parish priest, who rejoices, if your steward’s information is accurate and I’m sure it is, in the name of O’Donovan Brady. With a name like that he could have fought in the Williamite wars or fled to France with Patrick Sarsfield.’

  One bribe to an angelic child had Powerscourt rowed back to the mainland. Another, slightly larger one, sent a young footman on horseback to ask if it would be convenient for Lord Francis Powerscourt to call on Father Brady later that day. And so, shortly after five o’clock, Powerscourt had walked down the long drive and was standing in the main square of the little town of Butler’s Cross. Mulcahy and Sons, Grocery and Bar, seemed to be the main shop, dominating one side of the arena. It was flanked by O’Riordan, Bookmaker and Bar. Opposite them was the emporium of Horkan and Sons, Agricultural Suppliers and Bar. A pretty eighteenth-century house next door carried the discreet message, Delaney, Delaney and Delaney, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths. Just in front of the Roman Catholic church was MacSwiggin’s Hotel and Bar, fine rooms and wholesome Irish food. That meant ham and eggs, Powerscourt remembered, served twenty-four hours a day. Only in the legal establishment, he noted wryly, was it not possible to obtain alcoholic refreshment on the premises. Even then, the solicitors in their dark suits would probably whip out a bottle of John Powers finest whisky from their bottom drawer to close the transaction.

  At precisely five thirty Powerscourt rang the bell of the priest’s house. The door was answered by a remarkably pretty girl, presumably the housekeeper, in her early twenties who showed him into what she assured him was the Father’s study. The walls were lined with books, some of them in Latin, some printed in Rome. The walls carried a heady cocktail of political and religious messages. Directly above the fireplace was a full-length portrait of Daniel O’Connell, the man they called the Liberator, widely credited with securing Catholic Emancipation some eighty years before and the final repeal of the Penal Laws that had discriminated against his co-religionists. To the left of it, in a much smaller frame – Powerscourt wondered if this indicated the true strengths of the priest’s convictions, politics looming larger than God in his mind – a weary-looking Christ was dragging his cross up the hill they called Golgotha. To the right, the empty tomb, brilliant bursts of light pouring from its depths and the women kneeling in awe on the stony ground. Opposite them, posing in front of a barricade in the fashionable clothes of a French revolutionary of the mid-1790s, Theobald Wolfe Tone, leading member of the United Irishmen who fomented the rebellion in 1798. And a Protestant. A Protestant, moreover, from the unholy city of Dublin. Powerscourt thought that there must be rejoicing, even for the sinner that repenteth. Perhaps, after this passage of time, Tone had become an honorary Catholic, received into the faith with the compassion the Church was famed for from the hellfires where his heretic religion would have undoubtedly carried him. Powerscourt was not surprised that there was no place on these walls for Charles Stewart Parnell, Protestant leader in the Westminster Parliament of a group of largely Catholic MPs who almost brought Home Rule, a form of self government, to Ireland, only to be brought down by his adultery with the married Mrs Katherine O’Shea, an adultery condemned from the pulpi
ts of most of the Catholic churches in Ireland.

  ‘Good afternoon, Lord Powerscourt, how can I be of assistance?’ Father O’Donovan Brady was a short tubby man of about forty years, red of face, bald on top and with small suspicious eyes. His tone was polite but cold. Powerscourt thought he looked like Mr Pickwick, a billiard ball of a man, might have done had he been employed in the rack and thumbscrew department of the Inquisition, a priest more interested in sniffing out sin than in offering the consolation of salvation.

  ‘Thank you very much for seeing me at such short notice, Father,’ Powerscourt began. ‘I am staying with the Butlers up at Butler’s Court.’

  Father Brady interrupted him. ‘I know who you are, Lord Powerscourt, and I know the nature of your business here with us.’ Of course, Powerscourt remembered. Word of his arrival and his mission would have travelled down the long drive to the little town as fast as the kingfishers that flew across the river. Johnny Fitzgerald had once observed that the sending of telegrams or maybe even important and interesting letters was not a safe practice in Ireland – the contents might have been read long before they reached the intended recipient.

  ‘A fine family, in spite of their religion, the Butlers,’ the priest went on. ‘The local people will always remember them for the work they did here in this barony at the time of the famine, slaughtering their cattle and handing over their crops to feed the starving. Not that you could say that about most of the landlord class, not by a long way.’

  ‘I was wondering, Father,’ Powerscourt was picking his words very carefully now. He had spoken more truthfully than he knew when he talked to Mrs Butler earlier that day about entering enemy territory, ‘if you could offer me any advice about the missing paintings, whether or not this has happened before, that sort of thing.’